Espresso mainnet now finalizes transactions in under a second, the result of an upgrade the network's roughly 100 validators coordinated on September 9.

Achieving subsecond finality on Espresso mainnet required a ground-up redesign of consensus, networking, block building, and data availability. Benchmarks to come soon.

This upgrade also strengthens network resilience and lowers the cost of running an Espresso node.

Here's a full breakdown of the changes:

• Reduces the network hops required for finality from 7+ hops to 3 hops. 

• Removes chaining, decoupling the dependency of one block's finality on the liveness of later leaders; a stalled or Byzantine leader in a subsequent view no longer delays a block that has already been voted on.

• Removes the optimistic Data Availability Committee and associated voting round

• Cuts the block-building, data-availability, and voting work required per finalized block by roughly two-thirds.

• Replaces the prior CDN relay and libp2p gossip networking with cliquenet, a fully connected, encrypted mesh between validators.

• Every consensus message now reaches its destination in exactly one network hop.

• Peer discovery moved onchain: validators register their address and encryption key on the stake table contract, removing the need for separate discovery infrastructure.

• Block building moves from external builder services queried over HTTP to inside the leader node, built from each leader's own transaction pool.

• Block building now starts optimistically as soon as the previous proposal is received, and runs on a background thread so consensus never stalls.

• Removes multiple sequential builder round trips from the critical path of every proposal.

• Upgraded to a new erasure-coding scheme based on XOR operations.

• Moved to a more-optimized Reed-Solomon library and replaced Keccak with BLAKE3 for calculating share commitments.

• Parallelized encoding, share verification, and recovery across all available CPU cores.

• Removed serialization overhead in share encoding, cutting encode time for large shares by roughly an order of magnitude.

• Old consensus data, votes, and half-reconstructed blocks are garbage collected promptly, keeping node memory bounded under load.

• Lower hardware and bandwidth requirements for running a validator, even as finality gets faster.

As always, the code behind this upgrade is public. Review the GitHub repo, or check out the specific release branch.

Espresso provides real-time settlement for enterprise-scale chains and applications that demand speed, interoperability, and high degrees of customization without sacrificing sovereignty or architectural control. Unlike legacy blockchains, Espresso was built to serve as a base layer for other chains, providing subsecond finality and throughput built for institutional-scale volume. Espresso runs on a bespoke BFT consensus protocol, with validators staking ESP to secure the network.

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