Sneak Peek: Avalanche Pre-Consensus on eCash

The eCash development team has been making significant progress on Avalanche Pre-Consensus, a technology that will dramatically improve transaction finality, prevent transaction double spends, and enhance network scalability. This blog post will walk you through the current development milestones, what has been completed, and what’s still in progress.

What’s Been Achieved So Far

The following milestones have been successfully reached:

✅ Transaction Voting for the Avalanche Core

The Avalanche network now has the ability to poll and vote on transactions. Previously, it only voted on blocks and proofs. This is the fundamental building block for Pre-Consensus, allowing the network to reach an agreement on which transactions should be included in blocks.

✅ Store and Poll for Conflicting/Rejected by Policy Transactions

Since users can send multiple transactions attempting to spend the same UTXO (double spending), the network needs a way to handle these conflicts. Currently, nodes accept only the first-seen transaction and resolve conflicts only when a block is mined. With this milestone, nodes can track conflicting transactions and adjust their acceptance based on Avalanche votes—finalizing transactions before they’re included in a block.

✅ Reject Blocks that Contain Transactions Conflicting with Avalanche Votes

To ensure consensus integrity, blocks containing transactions that contradict the network’s finalized decisions should be rejected. Since post-consensus already rejects invalid blocks, this mechanism extends its functionality to enforce transaction-level finalization and prevent double-spends.

Ongoing Development

With these key milestones complete, development is now focused on finalizing the next critical steps:

🔄 Accepting or Rejecting a Transaction According to the Vote Status

This is the core logic that enables nodes to make decisions on which transactions to accept and which to reject, as well as clear out any rejected ones (and subsequent conflicts) to maintain network efficiency.

🔄 Storing and Mining Finalized Transactions

Miners must ensure they only include finalized transactions in their blocks and never include a conflicting transaction. Finalized transactions must be remembered permanently so their finalization status is never reversed. Full blocks need to be managed gracefully so that the node can handle high transaction volume while also ensuring that finalized transactions are tracked.

This method of incrementally building the block template as transactions are finalized prevents conflicts and improves performance by making block construction more efficient—a huge improvement for scaling.

Learn more at Avalanche.cash

The Bigger Picture: What Avalanche Pre-Consensus Brings to eCash

With Avalanche Pre-Consensus, the eCash Avalanche network can agree on individual transactions before they get mined into blocks. This ensures that transactions are finalized in real time, preventing conflicts and improving overall reliability. For businesses, this means instant payment confirmations. For users, it means seamless deposits without waiting for block confirmations. And for the entire eCash network, it lays the foundation for unparalleled efficiency and scalability.

Here’s why this is a game-changer:

🚀 Instant Transaction Finality: Currently, Post-consensus finalizes transactions after a single block is found, due to reorg being prevented by the Avalanche consensus. Pre-consensus validates individual transactions before they are included in a block, reducing confirmation time for a transaction from the current 10 minutes to less than 3 seconds - that’s more than 100 times faster than Proof of Work-only cryptos like Bitcoin.

⚡ Real-time Transaction Processing: Transaction throughput increases since the network will not have to wait for a block to validate transactions. Real-time Transaction Processing allows eCash nodes to prepare for each block before confirmation, significantly reducing the amount of work required when a block comes in.

The Final Stretch

The journey toward Avalanche Pre-Consensus has been a tough engineering challenge, but we’ve overcome major hurdles and are now closer than ever to achieving this groundbreaking feat. With Avalanche Pre-Consensus, eCash is on track to become the fastest and most scalable layer 1 blockchain with the ability to extend its capabilities via subnets. Stay tuned as we bring this groundbreaking upgrade to life—instant transactions are just around the corner!

Originally Published: https://e.cash/blog/sneak-peek-avalanche-pre-consensus-on-ecash