What causes the result of "confirmed" to change from "finalized" to something else?

Question

I have a solana program that has the following two instructions.

1. an instruction that writes a record to the PDA
2. an instruction that fails if this record exists and succeeds if it does not.

If 2 -> 1 is executed quickly with little time interval, the "confirmed" commitment will succeed, but the "finalized" commitment will fail with a non-negligible probability.

What causes the result of "confirmed" to change from "finalized" to something else? Is it possible to prevent this?

Answer 1

Finalized is the last status of a transaction. I'm not sure what you mean by "finalized" to something else? If you're asking how the status is determined then finalized is confirmed with 31+ block atop of its submission block.

You can deterministically execute instructions in order by putting them in the same transaction.