Paper: arXiv 2508.21075

Authors: Zijia Meng, Victor Feng

Abstract

Digital payments play a pivotal role in the burgeoning digital economy. Moving forward, the enhancement of digital payment systems necessitates programmability, going beyond just efficiency and convenience, to meet the evolving needs and complexities. Smart contract platforms like Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) networks and blockchains support programmable digital payments. However, the prevailing paradigm of programming payment logics involves coding smart contracts with programming languages, leading to high costs and significant security challenges. A novel and versatile method for payment programming on DLTs was presented in this paper - transforming digital currencies into token streams, then pipelining smart contracts to authorize, aggregate, lock, direct, and dispatch these streams efficiently from source to target accounts. By utilizing a small set of configurable templates, a few specialized smart contracts could be generated, and support most of payment logics through configuring and composing them. This approach could substantially reduce the cost of payment programming and enhance security, self-enforcement, adaptability, and controllability, thus hold the potential to become an essential component in the infrastructure of digital economy.

Complexity vs Empirical Score

  • Math Complexity: 3.0/10
  • Empirical Rigor: 2.0/10
  • Quadrant: Philosophers — conceptual discussion, limited math and data

Why this score: The paper proposes a conceptual framework (stream-oriented programming) with minimal advanced mathematics, but lacks any data, backtests, or implementation metrics, relying purely on theoretical discussion and analogies.

Research Flowchart

  flowchart TD
  A["Research Goal<br>How to improve programmability, security,<br>and cost-effectiveness of digital payments<br>on DLTs?"] --> B["Key Methodology<br>Introduce Stream Pipeline Framework:<br>Transform currencies to token streams,<br>pipeline smart contracts for processing"]
  B --> C["Data/Inputs<br>Payment Logic Requirements<br>Smart Contract Templates<br>Source & Target Account Data"]
  C --> D["Computational Processes<br>1. Authorize<br>2. Aggregate<br>3. Lock<br>4. Direct<br>5. Dispatch<br>via Configurable Pipelines"]
  D --> E["Key Findings/Outcomes<br>Reduced Programming Cost<br>Enhanced Security & Self-Enforcement<br>High Adaptability & Controllability<br>Essential Digital Economy Infrastructure"]

Cited References (20)

  1. Towards A First Step to Understand Flash Loan and Its Applications in DeFi Ecosystem (2020) — link
  2. A systematic framework to understand central bank digital currency (2018) — link
  3. Documentation (2006) — link
  4. MapReduce: simplified data processing on large clusters (2008) — link
  5. collection of foundational yet configurable smart contract templates to serve as the essential building blocks for payment programming
  6. Multiple Reporting Routers, each tasked with receiving funds, notifying the tax authority of the income specifics, and subsequently directing the funds to its designated Endpoint
  7. A Distributing Router that receives the funds from the previous Router and distribute them to various subsequent Routers based on a predefined allocation plan
  8. “Unix Pipelines”
and 12 more
  1. the ERC-20 standard lacks a notification mechanism to alert recipient smart contracts when a token transfer occurs
  2. Develop a tool that empowers users to customize and deploy smart contracts through the configuration and instantiation of these templates
  3. Gas and Fees
  4. A Time Locking Router set to periodically extract funds from the Stream Originator
  5. Define a standardized structure for stream-processing smart contracts that receive incoming token streams, transmit outgoing token streams, and handle the messages and errors in a normalized manner
  6. The Stream Originator, which acts as the initial repository for deposits and retains the funds
  7. Estimated Auditing Cost – ascertained based on the prevailing market rate
  8. “Programmable Money and Programmable Payments”
  9. “Purpose Bound Money Technical Whitepaper”
  10. Lines of Code (LOC) – gauge the extent of development workload necessitated for crafting a payment logic
  11. It is fundamentally challenging to incorporate loops into the pipeline
  12. “Intent-Based Architectures and Their Risks”

0 of 20 cited works are in the corpus; resolved via arXiv source bundles, Semantic Scholar and OpenAlex. Corpus-wide: 2518 linked papers.