A consensus mechanism is how a network decides which version of history is the real one, and every design trades one desirable property for another — which is why the last column here lists trade-offs rather than scores.
Compiled August 2026 from each project's own documentation. Block timings are protocol targets, not measurements. There is no “best” column and there will not be one.
Eight rows shown
| Mechanism | Block time, order of magnitude | How finality is reached | What it takes to take part | Known trade-offs |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Proof of work BTC, DOGE |
Minutes | Probabilistic. Confidence grows with each confirmation; there is no moment at which a block becomes final | Mining hardware and electricity. No stake required, no permission needed | Energy consumption is the cost of the security. Hardware access concentrates in practice. Reversal is never impossible, only progressively more expensive |
| Proof of stake, committee-based ETH |
Seconds | Explicit. Checkpoints are finalised after two consecutive justified epochs, and reversal then requires destroying a large amount of staked capital | 32 ETH to validate alone, or any amount through a pool | Staking concentrates in large providers. Slashing puts principal at risk. Finality takes minutes even though blocks arrive in seconds |
| Proof of stake with verifiable ordering SOL |
Under a second | Explicit, after enough stake has voted on a block | Stake plus substantial hardware and bandwidth | High hardware requirements limit who can validate independently. A history of full network halts. Throughput comes at the cost of running heavier nodes |
| Proof of stake, epoch-based ADA |
Seconds | Probabilistic, settling as blocks accumulate within and across epochs | Delegate any amount without locking it, or run a stake pool | Settlement assurance takes longer than in committee-based designs. Rewards decline as the reserve drains. Rewards are paid on an epoch boundary, not continuously |
| Nominated proof of stake DOT, AVAX |
Seconds | Explicit, through a finality process separate from block production | Bond tokens as a validator or nominate one. Minimums vary widely between the two networks | Polkadot bonds are locked for 28 days after you ask for them back. Avalanche does not slash for ordinary faults, which changes the incentive picture. Validator counts are capped or effectively bounded |
| Delegated proof of stake TRX |
Seconds | Explicit, once a supermajority of the elected producers has confirmed | Vote with staked tokens; producing blocks requires being elected into a small fixed set | A small producer set is what buys the speed. Elections are stake-weighted, so influence follows holdings |
| Federated agreement on trust lists XRP |
Seconds | Explicit, once enough validators on overlapping trust lists agree | Run a validator. No stake, no reward, no permission — but influence depends on appearing in other operators' trust lists | Security rests on trust lists overlapping and not colluding. Validators are unpaid, so the set depends on parties with outside reasons to run one. A widely used default list has outsized influence |
| Proof of stake, sharded TON |
Seconds | Explicit, coordinated through a masterchain that tracks the shards | Substantial stake to join the validator set | Sharding adds cross-shard messaging complexity. The active validator set is not large. A distinct developer environment with fewer audited patterns |
How to read this table without drawing the wrong conclusion
Fast is not better, it is different
Block time is how often the network produces a block. It is not how long until your transaction is irreversible, and the two can differ by orders of magnitude. Ethereum produces a block every twelve seconds and reaches explicit finality in a few minutes. Bitcoin produces one every ten minutes and never reaches explicit finality at all — you choose a number of confirmations you are comfortable with.
Probabilistic and explicit finality are different promises
Probabilistic finality says reversal gets exponentially more expensive as blocks pile up. There is no point at which it becomes impossible; there is a point at which nobody would pay for it.
Explicit finality says that after a defined condition, reversal requires an identifiable set of participants to lose an identifiable amount of capital. That is a stronger statement, and it depends on the slashing mechanism working and on the validator set being genuinely independent.
“What it takes to take part” is where decentralisation actually lives
A network is as decentralised as its participation barriers allow. Cheap-to-run nodes with no stake requirement produce one distribution; expensive hardware plus a large bond produces another. That column tells you more about a network's real shape than any label does.
Timings and participation requirements were taken from each project's own documentation in August 2026 and are targets and thresholds, not measurements. Nothing on this page is live. The individual records linked from each row set out the sources for that network in detail.
Related tools: how each chain charges for transactions · supply structure table