Earlier Confirmation, Different Guarantees
FCR counts Ethereum validators’ votes and applies additional checks before marking a block confirmed. Its guarantee depends on at least 75% of stake being honest and participating, and votes reaching honest validators within about eight seconds, Gnosis’s documentation says. Finality has a different protection: reversing a finalized block would require at least one-third of all stake to be slashed.
If those FCR assumptions fail, confirmation can slow down or fall back to finality. Gnosis says its bridges return to waiting for finalized blocks during Ethereum hard forks or network instability. In a safety failure, however, a fast-confirmed block can be replaced in a chain reorganization, or reorg.
For deposits already processed, the bridge-validator implementation specifies alerts, not automatic reversal: “nothing is undone on-chain (bridge contracts cannot un-sign).” A checker compares processed source blocks with the finalized chain. Operators must arrange manual signing for legitimate messages missed on the replacement chain.
Because Omnibridge mints tokens on Gnosis against assets held on Ethereum, a source deposit disappearing without being included again can leave the corresponding tokens without backing. The implementation does not specify who would cover a resulting loss.
The live bridge change is separate from the Ethereum Economic Zone framework, which Gnosis and Zisk unveiled earlier this year. Gnosis’s announcement describes atomic transactions as the next step: an Ethereum contract would be able to call a Gnosis contract and use its return value within the same transaction, without a bridge. FCR speeds the existing bridges; it does not deliver that cross-chain execution capability.