Consensus migration to Malachite complete

We have completed the migration of NeuroChain's consensus to Tendermint BFT, using Malachite from Informal Systems as an embedded Rust library rather than a separate process.

Why we replaced our own BFT

The hand-rolled engine passed every test we had, but those tests ran a single validator per shard — a quorum of one, which is not Byzantine fault tolerance at all. The first real multi-validator run deadlocked: round changes were local, validators drifted to different rounds and never aligned on a leader.

Rather than keep patching, we adopted an implementation with proven safety and liveness proofs.

What it gives us

• Quorum is two thirds of voting power by stake, with the safety proof intact.
• ML-DSA-65 signatures plug in as the signing scheme — Malachite is generic over it, so our quantum-safe keys fit without the BLS assumption other designs carry.
• AI touches consensus only at safe seams: proposer selection and validator exclusion. It can never influence the commit quorum, because that would break the Byzantine argument.

Our state machine, mempool and cross-shard relay stayed exactly as they were. The consensus engine is the only part that changed.