Use This When...	Protocol	Trade-off	Cons
You need sub-second finality and can afford 25% more validators	Minimmit	31% faster finality, 67% more nodes needed	No production battle-testing yet
You're building a blockchain exchange and MEV is eating your lunch	MonadBFT	Prevents tail-forking attacks, speculative finality	Complex accountability mechanisms
You want the boring, reliable choice that won't surprise you	Tendermint	Proven in production, extensive tooling	Not optimally responsive, can be slow
You need maximum throughput and don't mind complexity	HotStuff	Linear scalability, pipelining	Three phases add latency
You need 50% fault tolerance and have predictable network	Sync HotStuff	Double the fault tolerance	Requires synchrony assumptions
You want flexible finality levels for different risk appetites	Highway	Confidence-based finality, DAG efficiency	Complex to reason about for users