What if blockchain finality could be tied directly to the hardware’s memory cycle?

In Bitcoin, finality isn’t instant blocks are added roughly every 10 minutes, and most people wait for 6 confirmations (~60 minutes) before calling a transaction “final.” This delay is part of its proof-of-work design, prioritizing security over speed.

Ethereum is faster, using proof-of-stake with finality in about 60–90 seconds under normal conditions. It’s a big improvement, but still dependent on validator messages propagating across the network and being confirmed in slots/epochs.

Both systems and most others share the same bottleneck: finality happens at the network/software layer, so the time it takes is bound by message passing, block production, and confirmation rules.

Now imagine if finality wasn’t a network event at all, but a hardware event.
Modern high-bandwidth memory (HBM-DRAM) operates in nanoseconds. If consensus checks were done directly inside the memory cycle, a transaction could be validated and finalized at hardware speed before the network even broadcasts it. The network would just carry the already-finalized state.

Could this approach eliminate the network delay in finality, or would other bottlenecks (like I/O and storage) erase the gains?