The Consensus Race

Hedera, about 3 seconds. Hashgraph consensus is asynchronous Byzantine Fault Tolerant and deterministic: once the network assigns a transaction its consensus timestamp, the result is final, with no reorganizations and no waiting for confidence to grow. Hedera's own published figures put consensus finality under 3 seconds (2.90 seconds at time of review). The race uses 3 seconds. Sources: hedera.com, how it works and the docs on hashgraph consensus.

XRP Ledger, about 4 seconds. The network closes a new ledger version every 3 to 5 seconds, and a transaction in a validated ledger is final; validated ledgers are not reorganized. The race uses 4 seconds. Sources: the XRPL documentation on finality of results and the 3-to-5-second settlement figure.

Solana, about 13 seconds. A block reaches the network's own "finalized" commitment level once a supermajority has voted on it and at least 31 further confirmed blocks are built on top, which at the 400-millisecond slot target is roughly 12.8 seconds; real slots run 400 to 600 milliseconds, so real-world finality often lands in the teens. The race uses 12.8 seconds. Wallets often show an earlier "confirmed" status within a second or two; the race measures finalized. Source: the Solana guide to transaction confirmation and commitment levels.

Ethereum, about 15 minutes. Under proof of stake, blocks are justified and then finalized across epochs of 32 twelve-second slots; ethereum.org states plainly that "it takes about 15 minutes for an Ethereum block to finalize", and its own roadmap page adds that most users do not want to wait that long, which is why single-slot finality is being researched. The race samples inclusion within one 12-second slot and finality within the documented two-epoch window, so a typical run lands near 15 minutes and no two runs match. Inclusion in a block typically happens within seconds; finality is the slow part. Sources: ethereum.org on proof-of-stake consensus and single-slot finality.

Bitcoin, about 60 minutes. Bitcoin never declares a transaction absolutely final; confidence grows with each block built on top of it, and the developer guide's convention is that high-value payments wait for at least six confirmations, which at the 10-minute average block interval is about an hour. Blocks arrive randomly around that average, so individual waits scatter widely; a slow block is not a broken network. The race draws each of the six confirmation intervals fresh from an exponential distribution with a 600-second mean, the standard model for Poisson block arrival, so a typical run finishes near 60 minutes and individual runs scatter exactly as real waits do. Source: the Bitcoin developer guide on payment processing and confirmations.

Base: about 2 seconds to a soft confirmation, about 15 minutes to inherited finality, 7 days to a trust-minimized withdrawal. Base is an optimistic rollup built on the OP Stack. Its sequencer soft-confirms a transaction in about 2 seconds, which is an operator promise rather than consensus; real finality arrives when the batch containing the transaction is finalized on Ethereum, which the race samples from the same documented window as the Ethereum lane. Separately, the OP Stack's fault-proof design documents a 7-day challenge window before a withdrawal back to Ethereum can be finalized without trusting an operator; the race annotates that window on the lane as the withdrawal trust story, not as payment receipt, because a recipient on Base has the funds long before it closes. Sources: docs.base.org and the OP Stack documentation at docs.optimism.io on the challenge period.

Why every run differs. The deterministic lanes (Hedera, XRP Ledger, Solana's finalized commitment) do not meaningfully vary and are held at their documented figures. The probabilistic lanes are sampled fresh each run: Bitcoin's six block intervals and Ethereum's and Base's finality within the two-epoch window. The commentary calls out outliers when they land, and the end card compares this run against the documented averages, because a 22-minute Bitcoin block is not a malfunction; it is the distribution doing what the sources say it does.

The typical platform credit markers. Strict finality is the network's own standard; platforms that credit deposits publish their own, usually shorter, confirmation requirements. The gold markers use typical published counts: Bitcoin commonly 3 to 6 confirmations (marker at 3), Ethereum historically 14 to 64 blocks (marker at 14 blocks after inclusion), XRP Ledger near-immediate after validation, Solana about 1 confirmation, Base typically shortly after the sequencer's soft confirmation. These are typical published requirements drawn from the public per-asset confirmation tables that major exchanges maintain, among them Kraken's "Cryptocurrency deposit processing times" support page and Coinbase's network confirmations help page, last reviewed July 2026. They are not a quote of any single venue's current policy; individual venues change these counts, and the venue's own page is the authority.

What the race does not claim: that faster finality makes a better network, or that these figures hold during congestion, outages or attacks, or that you must wait for strict finality every time. For small amounts, trusted counterparties, or balances held inside a platform, earlier confirmation is routinely treated as good enough; finality matters most when the amount is large, the counterparty is a stranger, and there is no recourse. The figures are the documented normal-condition characteristics, last reviewed July 2026. This tool is distinct from our How Networks Agree report, which explains the mechanisms; this page only measures their clocks.