Written by Pablo Gómez
Founder & CEO at Metlabs · Reviewed on October 11, 2026
On Bitcoin, each additional block increases the work needed to reorganize a transaction. Finality is probabilistic: confirmations reduce reversal risk under stated assumptions, without establishing a universal safe threshold.
On Ethereum, validators justify and finalize checkpoints through stake-weighted votes. Finalizing conflicting histories would violate consensus conditions and expose a significant stake fraction to penalties.
Technical finality differs from legal settlement. A bridge or payment may add verification, dispute and delivery times. Fast interface confirmation does not necessarily establish base-layer finality.
Also known as
- Finality
