# Espresso Details HotShot's Already-Live Single-View Finality Upgrade By Simon Yoon Canonical URL: https://www.tokenpost.com/news/technology/43454 Published: 2026-10-29T11:17:05.000Z Updated: 2026-10-29T11:17:05.000Z Section: Technology > Two voting rounds finalize blocks in one proposal view. Validators coordinated the upgrade Sept. 9, and Espresso Foundation announced it was live on mainnet Sept. 14. Espresso detailed the design behind HotShot’s already-live upgrade on Oct. 20, explaining how two rounds of voting let blocks finalize in one proposal view without waiting on later leaders. A separate [Espresso benchmark]() recorded average finality of 778 milliseconds at a peak load of 1 million transactions per second. It involved 100 nodes and emulated global network latency. Validators coordinated the upgrade Sept. 9, and Espresso Foundation announced it was live on mainnet Sept. 14. The Oct. 20 technical disclosure describes how the deployed design handles a block from proposal to finality. Under the earlier chained-commit model, a block needed more than its own votes to become final. Certificates had to move through proposals in later views, or leader rounds. That tied a block’s finality to subsequent leaders completing their turns; a slow, offline or malicious leader could delay blocks that had already gathered enough support. HotShot’s revised flow completes the process within one view, the protocol round in which a leader proposes a block. The leader divides the block into erasure-coded pieces and distributes them to validators. Each validator sends its first vote to every other validator only after receiving its assigned piece. Any node that gathers a quorum of first-round votes can assemble the first certificate and broadcast a second vote. A quorum in that second round finalizes the block in the same view. Because validators vote only after receiving data pieces, a first-round quorum also indicates that enough pieces are distributed to reconstruct the block. HotShot removes its separate data-availability committee and the additional voting step it required. Nodes that miss some votes can still decide after receiving a certificate assembled elsewhere, removing the need for a separate view-synchronization protocol. Validators now send votes to every other validator, allowing nodes to build certificates independently. The change raises message complexity from O(n) to O(n²), roughly scaling with the square of the validator count. The added traffic is manageable at about 100 validators. If the set grows by an order of magnitude or more, the design would likely need to be revisited, with options including sampling, aggregate signatures or hierarchical vote relay. HotShot tolerates malicious validators controlling less than one-third of stake and prevents conflicting blocks from both reaching finality. ## Links in this article - [Espresso benchmark](https://www.tokenpost.com/news/technology/38774)