Consensus

Altius L1 finalizes blocks with a fast, deterministic Byzantine-fault-tolerant (BFT) consensus built on the commonware framework. Consensus is decoupled from execution: the two communicate over the standard Engine API, so the execution layer remains a conventional EVM client while consensus handles ordering and finalization.

Properties

• Deterministic finality. Once a block is finalized by the validator set it is final — there is no probabilistic reorg window to wait out, which matters for settlement and for HPEC commits.
• Fixed-interval block production. Blocks are produced on a configurable, sub-second cadence, giving predictable latency under load.
• BFT safety. The protocol tolerates a bounded fraction of faulty or malicious validators while preserving safety and liveness.
• Validator set management. The active validator set is managed through the chain's control plane (validator lifecycle), rather than being fixed at genesis.

Why decoupled consensus

Separating consensus from execution lets each evolve independently: the execution layer stays aligned with upstream EVM/Reth, while consensus is tuned for fast, deterministic finalization. It also makes the performance of the two layers easy to reason about and measure separately — see Benchmarks.

Note

Block interval and validator-set parameters are configurable per deployment. Exact values depend on the network configuration in use.