Settlement Finality

Two Notions

NIL distinguishes local finality — an HSC has produced a valid witness, the recipient has usable value — from global finality — the exposure that execution generated between domains has itself been cleared through netting or rebalancing.

Recipient-facing guarantees depend only on local finality. Global finality is a network-level bookkeeping property and does not gate recipient outcomes.

Why This Distinction Matters

Conflating the two would mean a recipient's finality could, in principle, be delayed or reversed by an unrelated rebalancing failure elsewhere in the network. By scoping recipient guarantees to local finality alone, a failure downstream is represented purely as unresolved exposure — never as a reversed settlement. See NIL-R03 and NIL-R04 for the underlying analysis.