Confidence Levels
A confidence level specifies how deep into a chain's consensus an event must be before CRE Connect emits it as a verifiable event. The trade-off is the same on every chain: lower confidence means lower latency but a higher chance of being reorganized away; higher confidence means longer waits but stronger guarantees.
The three levels
Level | Semantics | When to use |
|---|---|---|
latest | The event is included in the most recent block from the chain's perspective. Reorganizations can still drop it. | Read-only dashboards, tail-following loggers, low-stakes notifications. |
safe | The event is included in a "safe" block under the chain's pre-finality definition (post-Merge safe for Ethereum, finalized-by-fast-track on rollups). Reorgs are very unlikely. | Operational alerting, non-financial side effects. |
finalized | The event is in a block the chain treats as economically final. It cannot be reorganized away under honest-majority assumptions. | Anything that triggers irreversible business action — fund flows, regulatory reporting, downstream API calls. |
The exact mapping of safe and finalized depends on the chain. CRE Connect uses the chain's own definition (e.g. Ethereum's safe and finalized block tags, the equivalent rollup-specific tags) — consult the chain's documentation for precise semantics and the latency each level implies on that chain.
How confidence interacts with verification
Confidence and verification are independent properties:
| Property | Provides | Sensitive to |
|---|---|---|
| Verification | Cryptographic authenticity ("the DON observed this") | Tampering |
| Confidence | Chain-level finality ("the chain has agreed on this") | Reorganizations |
A latest-confidence event can pass verification and still be invalidated by a chain reorganization. Similarly, a finalized-confidence event that fails verification is suspect regardless of chain finality. Critical workflows should require both: verification passes and confidence ≥ finalized.
Per-network defaults
Each network supported by CRE Connect carries a default confidence level chosen by the platform. Watchers created on that network inherit the default unless the underlying extension or service specifies a different one. Applications can read the active confidence level back from each watcher and event so they always know the finality at which a given event was observed.
Related
- Watchers — the resource that emits events at a chosen confidence level.
- Verifiable Events — the cryptographic property that is independent of confidence.