Deterministic Finality

Deterministic finality, also called absolute finality, means a blockchain treats a transaction as irreversible the moment the protocol declares its block final, rather than becoming gradually safer with each confirmation. Such chains use a consensus rule in which a supermajority of validators votes on a block; once that threshold is reached, reversing it would require destroying a large share of staked capital, so honest nodes will never accept a competing history. This contrasts with probabilistic finality in proof-of-work, where a deep reorg is always theoretically possible but exponentially unlikely. For users and exchanges, deterministic finality shortens the wait before a deposit can be credited, though the guarantee holds only while the validator set behaves as the protocol assumes.