GlossaryAdvanced

Finality

The point at which a transaction is considered permanent and extremely unlikely to be reversed.

Finality refers to how confident participants can be that a confirmed transaction will never be reversed or removed from the blockchain's history.

Different consensus mechanisms offer different kinds of finality. Some provide probabilistic finality, where confidence increases as more blocks are added on top, while others aim for faster, more explicit finality guarantees.

Examples

Waiting for more block confirmations generally increases a transaction's practical finality.
Some networks are designed to reach finality within a fixed, short time window rather than gradually.