The trust state is recomputed in rounds by the registries. A round starts ten minutes after the previous one finishes, or sooner when new approvals or introductions arrive, and follows approval chains outward from the seeds. Nothing takes effect while a round is running: a key approved during one becomes trusted at the end of the next round that sees the approval.

That is why a newly approved person or bot stays pending for a few minutes, sometimes longer, however quickly the approval was published. The registries publish a counter and a timestamp of their trust state, which is the reliable way to tell whether a round has passed.