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.Documentation Index
Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.arc.io/llms.txt
Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.
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:| Network | Finality | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Arc | <1 s | Deterministic. Final on commit. |
| Ethereum L1 | 12-15 min | Two epochs of attestations required for finality. |
| Typical L2 rollup | ~7 days | Withdrawal finality depends on the challenge or proof window to L1. |
Use cases
Sub-second deterministic finality enables use cases that are impractical on slower networks:| Use case | How finality helps |
|---|---|
| Point-of-sale payments | A merchant can confirm payment and release goods without waiting for additional block confirmations. |
| Crossborder settlement | Transfers between counterparties finalize instantly, eliminating the settlement windows that introduce counterparty risk. |
| Institutional clearing | Trades and margin calls settle with immediate certainty, matching the expectations of traditional financial infrastructure. |
| Composable workflows | Multi-step onchain flows (such as swap-then-bridge) execute sequentially without polling or confirmation delays between steps. |
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.