A fault-tolerant mechanism that sets the roles, rules, and incentives for how consensus is achieved and information is written to the chain. Consensus on a single data value or network state is important for the chain’s continuous functioning as a distributed process involving multiple nodes participating together across a decentralized network. Consensus mechanisms can refer to any number of methodologies used to achieve agreement, trust, and security across the network. The two most prevalent are proof-of-work and proof-of-stake.