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:
Unchained, decoupled finality
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Reduces the network hops required for finality from 7+ hops to 3 hops.
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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.
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Removes the optimistic Data Availability Committee and associated voting round
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Cuts the block-building, data-availability, and voting work required per finalized block by roughly two-thirds.
Cliquenet networking
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Replaces the prior CDN relay and libp2p gossip networking with cliquenet, a fully connected, encrypted mesh between validators.
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Every consensus message now reaches its destination in exactly one network hop.
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Peer discovery moved onchain: validators register their address and encryption key on the stake table contract, removing the need for separate discovery infrastructure.
In-node block building
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Block building moves from external builder services queried over HTTP to inside the leader node, built from each leader's own transaction pool.
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Block building now starts optimistically as soon as the previous proposal is received, and runs on a background thread so consensus never stalls.
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Removes multiple sequential builder round trips from the critical path of every proposal.
Faster erasure coding and cryptography
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Upgraded to a new erasure-coding scheme based on XOR operations.
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Moved to a more-optimized Reed-Solomon library and replaced Keccak with BLAKE3 for calculating share commitments.
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Parallelized encoding, share verification, and recovery across all available CPU cores.
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Removed serialization overhead in share encoding, cutting encode time for large shares by roughly an order of magnitude.
Operator cost and reliability
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Old consensus data, votes, and half-reconstructed blocks are garbage collected promptly, keeping node memory bounded under load.
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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.
About Espresso
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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