Patterns for Blockchain-Based Payment Applications
This work addresses a gap for architects and developers in the emerging blockchain payment domain, offering incremental guidance rather than a new method.
The paper tackles the lack of systematic design knowledge for blockchain-based payment applications by identifying a token's lifecycle and presenting 12 patterns to guide state transitions, providing a holistic view for architects.
As the killer application of blockchain technology, blockchain-based payments have attracted extensive attention ranging from hobbyists to corporates to regulatory bodies. Blockchain facilitates fast, secure, and cross-border payments without the need for intermediaries such as banks. Because blockchain technology is still emerging, systematically organised knowledge providing a holistic and comprehensive view on designing payment applications that use blockchain is yet to be established. If such knowledge could be established in the form of a set of blockchain-specific patterns, architects could use those patterns in designing a payment application that leverages blockchain. Therefore, in this paper, we first identify a token's lifecycle and then present 12 patterns that cover critical aspects in enabling the state transitions of a token in blockchain-based payment applications. The lifecycle and the annotated patterns provide a payment-focused systematic view of system interactions and a guide to effective use of the patterns.