Crypto marketing often emphasizes speed: more TPS, faster blocks, lower latency.
But financial settlement is not a speed contest. It is a certainty requirement.
A fast block that can be reversed is not final settlement. A slightly slower block with deterministic finality is.
Plasma’s consensus approach — often referred to as PlasmaBFT — prioritizes deterministic, sub-second finality for stablecoin settlement flows.
Throughput vs Certainty 🧠
High throughput is useful for:
trading
experimentation
micro-interactions
Settlement needs:
irreversibility
deterministic confirmation
predictable inclusion
stable cost structure
Payment systems optimize for confidence, not benchmarks.
Why Reversibility Is Expensive 💸
When settlement is probabilistic:
counterparties wait
risk buffers increase
capital locks longer
reconciliation slows
Deterministic finality reduces:
counterparty risk
settlement delay
capital inefficiency
Payment UX Depends on Finality 💳
Real-world users care about one question:
“Is the payment done?”
Not:
TPS
block time
validator count
Just certainty.
That is why settlement-focused chains engineer finality first.
Final Thought ⚡
Fast is impressive.
Final is useful.
Money infrastructure chooses usefulness.