CAIN-42 CAIN StudioHow CAIN-42 compares · Protocols & infrastructure
CAIN-42 vs CometBFT / BFT consensus engines
General Byzantine fault-tolerant consensus engines (for example CometBFT, used by many chains) that order state across nodes. CAIN-42 ships its own PBFT (N=4, f=1, Q=3) for governance decisions.
What CometBFT / BFT consensus engines does well
- Battle-tested BFT consensus at large scale.
- Mature tooling, networks and operators.
- Free and open source.
What CAIN-42 does differently
- Enforces at the tool-call boundary, before anything runs.
- Orders authorization through a Byzantine quorum (3-of-4): one "yes" is never enough.
- Leaves a per-action signed receipt you can verify offline with a clean-room verifier.
- Authority continuity: a change to the model, tool, memory, skill or delegation forces a re-check.
- Self-serve from $19.75/mo; runs hosted, self-hosted or air-gapped.
Capability difference
| Capability | CAIN-42 | CometBFT / BFT consensus engines | Source (verified 2026-10-14) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Primary focus | Runtime governance in the execution path | Ordering governance decisions across CAIN nodes | CometBFT source page verified 2026-10-14 |
| Domain | Agent action governance | General state-machine replication | |
| Per-decision signed evidence / offline verifier | Yes — Ed25519, hash-chained, offline-verifiable | Consensus proofs (implementation-specific) | |
| Agent-native policy + execution boundary | Yes | Not in scope (consensus only) | |
| Public entry price | $19.75/mo self-serve | Free / OSS |
When to pick which
Use CometBFT (or similar) for general replication. Use CAIN-42 where the state being ordered is agent authority, with an execution boundary and per-action evidence on top.
Based on each vendor's public homepage and product pages, last reviewed 2026-10-14. No affiliation and no claim about their internals. "No*" means we found no public documentation of that capability, not that the vendor cannot do it.