I assumed deterministic finality meant there was one clear moment when a block became final.
Then I noticed @Dusk describes four different states: Accepted, Confirmed, Stable, and Final.
At first, that sounded like unnecessary terminology.
But the more I traced the progression the more it looked like four different levels of confidence about the same block.
Accepted: the committee has completed proposal, validation, and ratification.
Confirmed: later blocks have built on it.
Stable: it has become sufficiently buried to be considered probabilistically irreversible.
Final: it is unconditionally locked.
And that creates a distinction I hadn’t really considered:
consensus progress ≠ final settlement.
The interesting part is Stable.
If a block can be considered probabilistically irreversible before it reaches Final, then where exactly does “fast settlement” begin — and where does irreversible settlement actually begin?
That matters much more when the thing being settled is a regulated security.
If the security is sitting in an Accepted or Stable state, does the application already treat it as settled, or does it wait for Final before recognizing the ownership change as irreversible?
I don’t think those states are just technical labels anymore.
They describe different points at which an institution can become confident that the financial state it is looking at is actually the state it should rely on.
The question I’m still watching is how that distinction gets surfaced downstream.
Because for regulated assets, “the block is progressing” and “the ownership is final” are not necessarily the same statement.
#dusk $DUSK @Dusk
Then I noticed @Dusk describes four different states: Accepted, Confirmed, Stable, and Final.
At first, that sounded like unnecessary terminology.
But the more I traced the progression the more it looked like four different levels of confidence about the same block.
Accepted: the committee has completed proposal, validation, and ratification.
Confirmed: later blocks have built on it.
Stable: it has become sufficiently buried to be considered probabilistically irreversible.
Final: it is unconditionally locked.
And that creates a distinction I hadn’t really considered:
consensus progress ≠ final settlement.
The interesting part is Stable.
If a block can be considered probabilistically irreversible before it reaches Final, then where exactly does “fast settlement” begin — and where does irreversible settlement actually begin?
That matters much more when the thing being settled is a regulated security.
If the security is sitting in an Accepted or Stable state, does the application already treat it as settled, or does it wait for Final before recognizing the ownership change as irreversible?
I don’t think those states are just technical labels anymore.
They describe different points at which an institution can become confident that the financial state it is looking at is actually the state it should rely on.
The question I’m still watching is how that distinction gets surfaced downstream.
Because for regulated assets, “the block is progressing” and “the ownership is final” are not necessarily the same statement.
#dusk $DUSK @Dusk
