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Arc provides deterministic finality: every transaction is either unconfirmed or final, with no intermediate state. This guarantee comes from the network’s consensus layer, which uses a Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) consensus protocol—once two-thirds or more of validators sign off on a block, that block is irreversible. Every transaction in a committed block is immediately and irreversibly settled. There are no confirmation windows, no reorganization risk, and no probabilistic uncertainty.

Finality comparison

Arc’s Malachite BFT consensus, a Byzantine Fault Tolerant protocol, finalizes blocks in under one second. This is orders of magnitude faster than the finality guarantees on other networks:

Use cases

Sub-second deterministic finality enables use cases that are impractical on slower networks:

Developer benefits

Deterministic finality simplifies application design by removing the edge cases that probabilistic chains force you to handle.

No reorg handling

You don’t need retry logic, rollback mechanisms, or confirmation-count thresholds. A confirmed transaction stays confirmed.

Immediate offchain effects

Safely trigger downstream actions (webhooks, database writes, notifications) as soon as a block is committed, without waiting for additional confirmations.

Simplified state management

Your application only needs to track two transaction states—unconfirmed and final—rather than tracking a sliding confirmation window.

Enterprise compliance

Settlement finality is auditable and provable, meeting the assurance requirements of regulated financial institutions.