When you're building for global finance, finality is more than just a promise. It must be fast, irreversible, and reliable under real-world load. Arc's design achieves this through Malachite, a production-proven consensus engine and a core component of Arc's custom consensus layer. The reasons behind the speed: → Dual-binary architecture that separates consensus and execution → Lightweight block references and efficient propagation → Liveness subprotocol for message reliability → Timestamp verification optimized for sub-second blocks The result? Reliable, deterministic finality built for real-world loads.