pre-proposal: Notary Transaction

[rothexD]

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Title: Notary Transaction
Revision: 1 (2024-04-14)

Authors:
rothexD

Affiliation:
Broke student

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1. Introduction

Currently assets have to be transferd and held by a third party that can use these assets as they wish. This can lead to potentiall missuse. This is unavoidable in real life but can be avoided using blockchains. With this type of transactions the assets can be managed by the third party but not missused.

1.1 Use-Case

1. Currently in many juristictions assets have to be held by a notary until certain things have happend. For example a transfer of assets may have been agreed on by 2 parties but until the documentation has went through all goverment processes the assets have to be held by a notary or similar.
2. A digital shop may facilitate transactions between customers and businesses. The funds will be in the shops hand until the items have been shipped/refund period is over etc.. The shop can run with the funds/assets as they are holding it directly

Terminology

Issuer: the person starting the transfer of assets
Notary: the person managing the state of the transaction
Receiver: the person receiving the assets

2. Design Thoughts

1. The Issuer starts a Notary Transaction with an EndDateTime
2. The Notary Transaction locks the assets until the EndDatetTime or an action was performed by the Notary
3. The Notary Transaction can include a Notary Fee either fixed, incase of a NFT/Currency or % incase of Currency
4. The Issuer can set a ReleaseFlag for who the funds should go to if the Notary does not release the Assets until enddatetime
   5.1 Either the funds go back to the Issuer or Receiver
5. The Notary can release/partially complete/cancel the transfer of assets until the enddatetime to the Receiver
6. For release and cancel Notary automatically gets the full amount, for partial the Notary gets a partial amount of the Notary Fee
7. The Issuer and the Receiver can release the Assets past its EndDateTime following the ReleaseFlag logic

3. Limits

Currently i did not think about assets that are frozen or have clawback enabled

This is currently very early on and no idea if this would be the best way of doing it. I am working on writing this up 🤠

[mvadari]

I recommend writing this as a pre-proposal idea since it seems like the details are still being worked out, and publishing an XLS once you have a full write-up :)

[rothexD]

Thx I thought I published it as a preprosal will update

[mvadari]

Oh, you did, sorry - pre-proposals don't get XLS numbers, so just remove that part 🙂 You can claim an XLS number once you're ready.

[sappenin]

Hi @rothexD - thanks for starting your discussion.

I'm curious - could the notary role be performed by the ledger itself using the Escrow feature?

Or perhaps instead: are you looking for a few 3rd parties to coordinate some assets in a single account? In that case, I wonder if multisig could be used. E.g., have a single account that requires (e.g.) a 2-of-2 multi-sign to move funds (e.g., a sig from the notary and another one from the docs provider that you allude to in your description).

(I'm trying to determine if what you're proposing is already possible with existing functionality)

[rothexD]

I had another look at Escrow and played with my different scenarios it's a bit complicated to setup but i think it would be possible using Escrow

Thanks a lot @sappenin