Abstract
We specify an item-level digital gift voucher (a prepaid claim on one specific good at one merchant) with a transfer-only intermediate state. The payer directs the voucher not to a recipient but to an intermediary who cannot redeem it: the intermediary's only available operation is to pass it on, and on passing it becomes an ordinary redeemable voucher held by the recipient. Non-redeemability is enforced by the state machine rather than by policy: redeem, and any conversion to store credit or refund, is absent from that state. One record carries the chain of custody (payer, intermediary, recipient). The payer's identity may be suppressed from every party while the chain stays visible, and thanks are addressed to a role in the chain and resolved to an account only at delivery, so an anonymous payer can be thanked without the name reaching the sender. No party receives referral compensation for propagating it. The anonymity serves to make the intermediary be perceived as the giver, rather than to protect the donor. One expiry rule generates the lifecycle: a clock runs only while the voucher has no addressee, so an unassigned voucher lapses on a window while a recipient's claim ends only with the merchant's closure, disclosed at receipt, and the merchant is given no forward view of pending lapses. Extensions: a rule-governed fund as anonymous issuer, selecting merchant and intermediary by a verifiable draw and re-addressing lapsed vouchers; and an unpriced merchant invitation to a place and time, non-convertible by construction.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Recommended Citation
Ly, Thon, "The Unpaid Relay: A Transfer-Only Intermediate State for Item-Level Digital Gift Vouchers, with Chain-of-Custody Records, Donor-Identity Suppression, Role-Addressed Thanks and No Referral Compensation", Technical Disclosure Commons, (October 01, 2026)
https://www.tdcommons.org/dpubs_series/11921