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Lifecycle of a Request

The typical lifecycle of a request is as follows:

Typical Lifecycle of a Request

Create a request

  • The payer or payee signs the request which contains the payee, payer, currency, amount, payment details, and arbitrary content data.
  • The request can be optionally encrypted such that only the payee, payer, and approved 3rd parties can view the request contents.
  • The request is persisted in IPFS.
  • The IPFS Content-addressable ID (CID) is stored in a smart contract on Gnosis chain

{% hint style="info" %} Requests are created by storing their CIDs on Gnosis, but this doesn't mean payment must occur on Gnosis. Payment can occur on any of the supported chains including 20+ EVM-compatible chains or NEAR. {% endhint %}

Update a request

  • The payee can optionally cancel the request or increase/decrease the expected amount.
  • The payer can optionally accept the request, indicating that they intend to pay it.
  • Both payee and payer can add 3rd party stakeholders if the request is encrypted.

Pay a request

  • The payer derives a paymentReference from the request contents.
  • The payer calls a function on the payment network smart contract, passing in the token address, to address, amount, and paymentReference.
  • An event is emitted containing the token address, to address, amount, and paymentReference.

{% hint style="info" %} Most requests are "reference-based" meaning that a paymentReference derived from the request contents is logged on-chain via a smart contract that emits an event. Nothing gets written back to IPFS when paying a "reference-based" request.

The exception is when paying a "declarative" request, in which case, data is written back to IPFS. This includes when the payer declares that the payment was sent and the payee declares that the payment was received. {% endhint %}

Retrieve a request / Detect a payment

  • The event is indexed by the payments subgraph
  • An app can retrieve the request contents from IPFS and calculate the balance based on events from the payments subgraph.

{% hint style="info" %} The request balance is calculated by adding up all the on-chain payment events with the same paymentReference. Partial payments are possible. {% endhint %}

All of these steps are facilitated by the Request Network JavaScript SDK such that the developer needs only make a few function calls. See the Quickstart to learn more.