Payments That Stay Settled

In payments, the word settled usually comes with fine print. A card authorisation clears in seconds and can be reversed for months. On probabilistic blockchains, a merchant waits a chosen number of confirmations and accepts the residual risk that the ledger reorganises underneath them. Chain 2800, a public EVM Layer 1, shortens the fine print to one line: for the validators a block is final the moment a quorum of seven of ten validators signs it (ten validators since 2026-09-11), about 0.60 seconds after your transaction enters it (block time measured at 0.597 s, re-measured 2026-11-03), and the consensus has no mechanism for taking a finalized block back; from block 25,080,000 (AIP-22 stage 5) a reader outside consensus settles a payment once its block is at or below the finalized block, at most one anchor interval (32 blocks, about 20 seconds) behind the head (below).

No consensus chargebacks

On a probabilistic chain, finality is a probability that improves with time, and a reorg is the ledger itself issuing a chargeback: blocks both sides treated as settled are replaced, and every payment inside them is unwound. Processors compensate with confirmation-depth policies, reorg monitoring, and float held against the chain changing its mind. Chain 2800 uses QBFT consensus, where finality is a property of the protocol rather than a probability: once seven of ten validators have signed a block, it is final, and there are no reorgs on the validators by design; from block 25,080,000 (AIP-22 stage 5) a node that does not take part in consensus, such as the public RPC endpoints, admits a header between anchors on the Falcon-512 seal of its proposer alone, so until the next anchor the blocks above its finalized block, including blocks it has already shown, can be replaced by a branch that the key of a single validator builds (such a node keeps the total-difficulty fork choice of the upstream client; the rule that never leaves a decided block runs on the validators only); for settlement, read the finalized or safe block, which moves only on an anchor certificate that the key of one validator cannot produce (derived from the code; measured on the rehearsal network 28099 with a classical-only fork, AIP-22 record of 2026-09-27: such a node followed the fork up to the block before the next anchor and moved to the anchored chain once linked to an honest validator; not measured: the same with a post-quantum key from stage 5, and whether a node started from the published package, with its seal ceiling at 1, answers these tags the same way). Deterministic sub-second finality on the validators is the performance claim of this page; for money read through the public endpoints, the figure that matters is the finalized block, at most one anchor interval (32 blocks, about 20 seconds) behind the head. When the block closes the payment is settled for the validators, and for any node that requires a quorum of seals in the certificate once the finalized block reaches it; settled does not decay.

A receipt that does not expire

Consensus on chain 2800 is hybrid in a precise and limited sense: every 32nd block header carries a certificate of validator Falcon-512 seals bound under the block hash, live since block 13,014,000 and enforced at a minimum of three seals (f+1 of the nine validators of that time) since 2026-08-14, raised to six seals, then as many as the quorum of nine, at block 14,961,456 (2026-08-21); ten validators since 2026-09-11, where six was below the quorum of seven until block 20,715,632, on 2026-09-29, raised the minimum to seven, as many as the quorum of ten (below block 24,148,752 the seals proved those validators signed the block, not that it was decided, per the AIP-22 erratum of 2026-10-01, and from that block a certificate that carries the quorum of one round proves the decision), and a validator does not finalize an anchor block without it (a node started from the published node package lowers that count to one seal); QBFT finalizes every block, whose votes every validator attributes, since block 24,300,000 (AIP-22 stage 4), only through their verified post-quantum seals (corrected 2026-11-04: from block 24,300,000 until 2026-10-31 12:27Z one path of the second client took the author of a proposal that named a height below 24,300,000 from its ECDSA envelope, as the correction of 2026-11-01 to rule 3 of AIP-22 says) (since block 25,080,000, AIP-22 stage 5, headers no longer carry ECDSA commit seals and are admitted on the Falcon-512 seal of their proposer alone; a commit still carries the ECDSA commit seal of its validator as an additional check). (Correction 2026-08-19: the earlier statement that from block 14,050,000 every block required a six-of-nine post-quantum quorum to finalize is withdrawn; the per-block rule armed at that height is retired in the shipped code in favour of the anchor rules and changed no enforcement.)

For a processor, this is about the paperwork, not the plumbing. The settlement records you show an auditor, a regulator, or a counterparty in a dispute are only as durable as the signatures beneath them, and for the classical signatures securing most chains, NIST's post-quantum migration guidance (IR 8547, initial public draft 2024) schedules deprecation after 2030 and disallowance after 2035. A payment settled on chain 2800 sits under a post-quantum anchor, so demonstrating years from now that it happened, exactly as recorded, does not rest on cryptography that has since been retired. For retention obligations measured in decades, that is the difference between a receipt and a receipt with an expiry date. The same property, applied to documents rather than payments, is described on the notarization page.

Integration is the boring part, by design

Chain 2800 offers EVM compatibility under Ethereum's Prague and Osaka rules, with one exception: the EIP-4788 beacon-roots contract has no code. MetaMask connects, ethers works, hardhat and foundry compile and deploy without modification. If your team has integrated any EVM chain, they have integrated this one; the post-quantum layer lives inside consensus and asks nothing of your application code. Contracts that want post-quantum verification directly can call the four NIST signature verifier precompiles live since block 9,189,161 (Falcon-512, Falcon-1024, ML-DSA-44, SLH-DSA-SHA2-128s; the fifth, SHAKE256, is a hash), validated against official NIST vectors (corrected 2026-10-28: this said five verifier precompiles). The native token is AERE, with a fixed supply of 2.8 billion set at genesis and no new minting. Start at the developer hub, and read the architecture page for how the pieces fit.

Honest boundaries

All ten validators are operated by the Foundation today (ten since 2026-09-11). The chain is not yet decentralized and we do not describe it that way; an independent-operator program is being built. There is no completed third-party security audit yet; it is on the roadmap. We do not publish throughput figures; deterministic sub-second finality on the validators is the performance claim we stand behind. And this page describes what the chain can do and how we engage, not a deployed retail payments product: we do not offer card programs, banking services, or custody.

Three ways to work with us

A payments pilot. A scoped engagement with our team: pick one bounded settlement flow, run it on chain 2800, and measure finality and operational load together before anything larger is committed.

An integration. Your engineers build against the chain directly, with the EVM tooling they already use. The developer hub has the network details and examples, and we answer questions while you build.

Independent verification. Do not take this page's word for anything. Run the anchor verifier, run the 35-check suite, read the research library and the sample conformance report, and only then talk to us.