Records and what they prove
A record's states, its proves statement, and its agreement and channel legs.
The door keeps one record per ATR, keyed by its hash. The record is the payment's state: a connector keeps none of
its own and reads it with status.
States
stateDiagram-v2
[*] --> issued: issue
issued --> settling: claim, or a report the door reads as landed
settling --> paid: settlement read
issued --> paid: report of a settled payment
paid --> closed: report of a channel's close| State | Meaning |
|---|---|
issued | The ATR is in the seller's storage and its hash has been placed. No payment is recorded. |
settling | A payment was claimed, or reported, and its settlement is not yet read. The door finishes the record. |
paid | The payment is recorded as settled. |
closed | A channel pairing's close was reported and read. |
proves
Every record, and every claim answer, states what it proves:
| Field | Meaning |
|---|---|
claimed | true when the claim read H from the payment itself. false when nothing was claimed, for example on a card payment or a report without a claim. |
pattern | The pairing's pattern: how it carries H, whether the buyer signs it, whether it lands on chain and whether something public carries it, and proves, the sentence stating what a record of this pairing shows and what it does not. null while nothing is recorded. |
settledBy | What made the payment paid: read (a read of the rail), facilitator (the facilitator's settle answer) or seller-report (the seller's report, on a pairing with nothing to read). null while unpaid. |
Show proves to the buyer and the seller as the door returns it. Never claim that the buyer signed the hash where
claimed is false.
For x402/exact/eip155/eip3009, the sentence reads:
The payer signed an EIP-3009 transfer authorization whose nonce is this ATR's hash. The token contract verified that signature when it executed the transfer, and the hash is on chain as the nonce topic of its AuthorizationUsed event in the settlement transaction. This does not show that amount, payee, asset or timing match the ATR's content.
Every pairing's sentence is in the pairings reference.
The agreement leg
Where a pairing's payment carries no public proof of H, a seller can require the agreement step: before the full
payment, the buyer's agent pays a nominal amount in a payment whose signed payload carries H. The record's
agreement is then {state, network, transaction}:
required: the buyer has not paid the agreement URL yet;settling: the agreement payment is settling;recorded: the agreement payment is on chain, intransactiononnetwork.
agreement is null when the record needs no agreement step. See the agreement step.
The channel leg
For a channel, session or subscription pairing, one ATR covers the whole channel. The record's channel is
{network, channel, until, closed}, where until is the rail's deadline for the channel, or null when the rail
gives none. See channels, sessions and subscriptions.
Declined, not refused
A pushed payment is one the buyer broadcast before the claim. If its check fails, the money has already moved, so
the door answers 200 with state: "declined", the check's code, the hash the payment is bound to (or null) and
the landed transaction, and the record carries a declined notice with the same facts. The door never refuses a
payment that has moved; what happens to the money is between the parties.
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