Finality & Settlement
PulseVM's most underrated property: the head block is the last irreversible block.
- Blocks finalize in well under a second.
- There is no reorg case — not "unlikely", structurally absent. A transaction is either rejected immediately or settled permanently.
- No confirmation-count policies, no "wait N blocks" memos for your risk committee, no probabilistic language in your SLA.
"When is this transfer settled?" has a one-word answer: now.
Reads are free, for anyone
Every read is free. An auditor or regulator can be handed a node or an indexer and get complete, real-time visibility into the chain's state — no per-query cost, no privileged access tier. Verifiability is a property of the network, not a paid feature.
What happens under network partition
Finality is a safety guarantee: the network never produces two conflicting "final" states. If the validator set were ever unable to reach quorum, the protocol favors safety over liveness — it waits for quorum and resumes, rather than forking into divergent histories. For a settlement system this is exactly the right trade: there is never a reconciliation problem, only resumption.
Why this matters more than TPS
Payment and settlement systems are defined by their failure semantics, not their peak throughput. Deterministic, instant finality removes an entire class of operational policy (reorg handling, finality monitoring, double-spend windows) from every integration that touches the chain.
How it works
Metal Blockchain's Snowman consensus finalizes each block through repeated randomized sampling of the validator set — fast metastable agreement that suits small, accountable validator sets (a consortium's named institutions) as well as larger public sets.