Transaction Finality through Ledger Checkpoints

The reversal of transactions due to blockchain ledger reorganization has become a major hindrance for public blockchain technologies' adoption in real-world business and financial applications. Since a typical real-world product, service, or agreement cannot be reversed; associated transactions in the blockchain ledger must also be final. This paper describes and analyzes the transaction finality solution for our proof of work (PoW) mining based blockchain network, the Kona Blockchain Platform. The solution works even if 49% of the network's total mining power is compromised due to malicious attacks. Although designed for our specific platform, the ideas from the solution can be easily adapted to achieve transaction finality in existing public blockchain networks. This paper also discusses how this can be done. To the best of our knowledge, ours is the first solution for deterministic transaction finality for blockchain networks incentivized exclusively by PoW mining.