Consensus family where the longest (or heaviest) valid chain is considered canonical, originally used in Bitcoin's Proof of Work. Participants probabilistically converge on a single chain without explicit voting rounds. Solana's Tower BFT is not Nakamoto consensus — it uses explicit BFT voting with lockout periods rather than chain-length selection, providing deterministic rather than probabilistic finality.
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Consensus family where the longest (or heaviest) valid chain is considered canonical, originally used in Bitcoin's Proof of Work. Participants probabilistically converge on a single chain without explicit voting rounds. Solana's Tower BFT is not Nakamoto consensus — it uses explicit BFT voting with lockout periods rather than chain-length selection, providing deterministic rather than probabilistic finality.
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Think of it as part of the chain machinery that keeps ordering, execution, or consensus moving.
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Consensus, leader rotation, slots, epochs, and the runtime.
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Nakamoto Consensus (nakamoto-consensus) Category: Core Protocol Definition: Consensus family where the longest (or heaviest) valid chain is considered canonical, originally used in Bitcoin's Proof of Work. Participants probabilistically converge on a single chain without explicit voting rounds. Solana's Tower BFT is not Nakamoto consensus — it uses explicit BFT voting with lockout periods rather than chain-length selection, providing deterministic rather than probabilistic finality. Related: Consensus Mechanism, Tower BFT, Finality, Fork Choice
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The protocol by which nodes in a distributed network agree on the current state of the ledger. Common mechanisms include Proof of Work (Bitcoin), Proof of Stake (Ethereum, Solana), and BFT variants. Consensus ensures all honest nodes converge on the same transaction history despite potential network delays or malicious actors.
Solana's custom BFT consensus algorithm built on top of Proof of History. Tower BFT uses PoH as a clock to reduce communication overhead in traditional PBFT from O(n²) to O(n). Validators vote on forks with exponentially increasing lockout periods—each consecutive vote doubles the lockout, making rollbacks progressively more expensive. A fork is finalized when it reaches supermajority (66.7%+ of stake).
The guarantee that a transaction cannot be reversed. Solana offers two levels: optimistic confirmation (~400ms, 66.7%+ stake voted) and full finality (~12-13 seconds, 31+ confirmations rooted). Once a slot is rooted, its transactions are irreversible under the assumption that no more than 1/3 of stake is malicious.
The algorithm validators use to decide which fork to build upon when multiple competing chains exist. Solana combines Tower BFT voting weight (stake-weighted votes with lockout) and a GHOST-like rule to select the fork with the heaviest cumulative stake support.
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BFT consensus protocol using two-phase voting (prevote + precommit) with a 2/3 supermajority threshold. Unlike Tower BFT which votes on a continuously growing PoH chain, Tendermint uses round-based block proposals. Tower BFT achieves lower latency by avoiding per-round communication overhead, leveraging PoH as a shared clock instead.
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The protocol by which nodes in a distributed network agree on the current state of the ledger. Common mechanisms include Proof of Work (Bitcoin), Proof of Stake (Ethereum, Solana), and BFT variants. Consensus ensures all honest nodes converge on the same transaction history despite potential network delays or malicious actors.
Solana's custom BFT consensus algorithm built on top of Proof of History. Tower BFT uses PoH as a clock to reduce communication overhead in traditional PBFT from O(n²) to O(n). Validators vote on forks with exponentially increasing lockout periods—each consecutive vote doubles the lockout, making rollbacks progressively more expensive. A fork is finalized when it reaches supermajority (66.7%+ of stake).
The guarantee that a transaction cannot be reversed. Solana offers two levels: optimistic confirmation (~400ms, 66.7%+ stake voted) and full finality (~12-13 seconds, 31+ confirmations rooted). Once a slot is rooted, its transactions are irreversible under the assumption that no more than 1/3 of stake is malicious.
The algorithm validators use to decide which fork to build upon when multiple competing chains exist. Solana combines Tower BFT voting weight (stake-weighted votes with lockout) and a GHOST-like rule to select the fork with the heaviest cumulative stake support.
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A clock mechanism that cryptographically proves the passage of time between events. PoH uses a sequential SHA-256 hash chain where each output becomes the next input, creating a verifiable ordering of events without requiring consensus. The leader produces ~400,000 hashes per slot (~400ms), and any validator can verify the sequence in parallel, enabling Solana's high throughput by removing the need for validators to agree on time.
Solana's custom BFT consensus algorithm built on top of Proof of History. Tower BFT uses PoH as a clock to reduce communication overhead in traditional PBFT from O(n²) to O(n). Validators vote on forks with exponentially increasing lockout periods—each consecutive vote doubles the lockout, making rollbacks progressively more expensive. A fork is finalized when it reaches supermajority (66.7%+ of stake).
A time window during which a designated leader validator can produce a block. Each slot lasts approximately 400 milliseconds. Slots are numbered sequentially from genesis and grouped into epochs of 432,000 slots (~2-3 days). Not every slot produces a block—a skipped slot means the leader was offline or too slow.
A set of entries produced by a leader during a single slot. A block contains transactions bundled into entries, each with a PoH hash proving ordering. Blocks are broken into shreds for network propagation via Turbine. Maximum block size is limited by compute units (48M CU cap per block) rather than byte size.