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Consensus Mechanism

Block production and finality

Selendra uses Aura for block production and AlephBFT for finality.

Aura (Block Production)

  • Authority-based round-robin
  • 1-second blocks
  • Validators selected by stake weight
  • Deterministic and predictable

AlephBFT (Finality)

  • Byzantine Fault Tolerant
  • Deterministic finality
  • Finalized blocks never revert
  • Used by AlephZero and other production chains

Measured finality latency

Finality trails block production by about one block.
Measured over 498 consecutive mainnet blocks from https://rpc.selendra.org on 14 August 2026:

Time to finality
Median1.00s
90th percentile1.22s
95th percentile1.37s
99th percentile2.45s
Slowest in sample6.4s

Design for one to two seconds. The tail is real, so do not treat the median as a guarantee.

Reproduce it by timing the gap between chain_subscribeNewHeads and chain_subscribeFinalizedHeads for the same block number. That gap includes network latency to your client, so it is an upper bound on committee time.

Validator Selection

  • Minimum stake requirement (25K SEL)
  • Current: 4 validators
  • Roadmap: 20 by 2026, 50+ by 2027
  • Rotated every era (24 hours)

Security

  • Requires 2/3 honest stake
  • No forks after finality
  • Higher threshold than Bitcoin's 51%

Penalties

  • Offline → lost era points, so lost rewards
  • Underperforming non-reserved validators → committee ban
  • No pallet_offences in the runtime, so no automated slashing today

Production Use

Selendra: Independent L1 chain (not a parachain), full sovereignty over consensus.


See Also: Whitepaper - ConsensusRun ValidatorTech Specs

Consensus Mechanism - Selendra