Consensus Mechanisms: A Reference Table

Entry last verified June 2026.

The families

Mechanism	Secured by	Finality	Notable networks
Proof of work	Energy and hardware	Probabilistic	Bitcoin, Litecoin, Monero
Proof of stake	Staked capital, with slashing	Economic, explicit	Ethereum, Cardano, Solana
Delegated proof of stake	Elected block producers	Explicit, fast	Various
Proof of authority	Identified, permissioned validators	Explicit	Private and consortium chains
Proof of history combined with stake	Verifiable time ordering plus stake	Explicit	Solana
Byzantine fault tolerant variants	Known validator set voting	Explicit, immediate	Cosmos chains, enterprise networks

What each trades

Proof of work. Buys security with an external resource that must be purchased and consumed in the physical world. Costs energy. Concentrates where power is cheap.

Proof of stake. Buys security with capital denominated in the asset itself. Negligible energy use. Concentrates through large staking providers and liquid staking products.

Delegated variants. Buy speed by reducing the validator set. Higher throughput, fewer independent parties.

Proof of authority. Buys performance by abandoning permissionless validation entirely. Appropriate for private networks, not comparable to public chains.

BFT variants. Buy immediate finality by requiring a known validator set to vote. Fast and final; the set must be known, which bounds how permissionless it can be.

The parameters worth comparing

Rather than the mechanism name, these determine the properties that matter.

Question	Why it matters
How many independent block producers?	Censorship and liveness
What does running a validating node cost?	How many parties can verify
How long until finality?	When a payment is safe to act on
What does attacking cost, in currency?	The actual security budget
Who can change the rules?	Whether the guarantees are durable

Two networks using the same named mechanism can differ enormously on all five.

The measurement problem

Published comparisons typically use validator count, which is misleading. A network with many validators operated by few entities is concentrated, and the entity count is harder to obtain than the node count.

Stake concentration among the largest operators is the more informative figure for proof-of-stake networks, and pool concentration is the equivalent for proof of work. Both are computable from public data and both are quoted less often than the flattering number.

Practical relevance

For a holder, the consensus mechanism matters mainly through finality timing and the cost of attacking the chain.

Finality determines how long a venue waits before crediting a deposit. Confirmation requirements are published by platforms including exchanges quoting a direct fiat pair, and comparing them across assets is a practical proxy for how much settlement assurance each chain provides.