Sub-Second Finality and Why Plasma Is Built for Real-Time Finance
Speed matters when money is moving. Plasma’s sub-second finality is not a vanity metric — it is a requirement for real-time financial systems.
Most blockchains were not designed for payment finality. Transactions may be “included” quickly but remain probabilistic or reversible for minutes. This is fine for speculation, but unacceptable for merchants, payroll systems, or treasury operations.
Plasma solves this with PlasmaBFT, a pipelined implementation of Fast HotStuff consensus. By overlapping proposal, voting, and commitment phases, Plasma achieves deterministic finality within seconds — often under one second.
For developers, this means building applications where settlement actually feels instant. Payments can be confirmed immediately. Merchants don’t need risk buffers. Automated systems can act on finalized state without waiting.
For users, the experience is closer to swiping a card than submitting a blockchain transaction. There is no anxiety about confirmations or reversals.
Sub-second finality turns Plasma into infrastructure suitable for everyday finance, not just crypto-native activity. It allows stablecoins to function like real money — fast, final, and reliable — at global scale.
