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Payment Timing (per method) — How long does a payment actually take?

Status: Not Started
Priority: High
Last Updated: 2026-09-27
Contributors Welcome: Yes

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What We Don’t Know

For each payment method, two latencies that together bound how long a seller must wait for a payment before it is safe to consider the request dead:

1. Sender → payment: from seeing the payment instructions to actually completing the payment (opening the bank app, entering details, confirming).
2. Payment → notification: from the payment landing to the seller’s notification arriving (the bank app’s push/SMS that lets the seller auto-fund the covenant).

Both vary: e.g. a bank notification may arrive immediately, or be delayed by minutes.

For cash in person the two collapse into one: the time for the sender to physically hand over the cash (a plausible default is ~5 minutes).

For Bizum / SEPA / other rails we have no data.

Why It Matters

The covenant fund request needs a pay-by window per method. Too short → legitimate payments get cancelled while in flight. Too long → a pending request blocks a reference (we allow one active covenant per CashAccount). The window must be method-specific, not a global constant.

Where this is used: the pay-by window on the fund-request lifecycle. Cash in person currently defaults to 5 minutes.

Current Hypothesis

• Cash in person: ~5 minutes is enough.
• Bizum: sender ~30-60 s; the bank notification is the risky part — minutes, variable.
• SEPA / others: unknown, likely hours (different rails entirely).

Investigation Method

1. Instrument the client to log, per payment: request → marked sent and marked sent → seller notification received.
2. Collect real samples per method and region; compute P50 / P90 / P99.
3. Correlate with bank / carrier / OS to see the variance drivers.
4. Derive a per-method pay-by window (with safety margin) and re-measure.

Success Criterion

Per-method latency distributions (P50/P90/P99) for both legs, with a justified pay-by window per payment method.

Phase 0 Trial Integration

Log both timings (request→sent, sent→notification) on every payment, tagged by method.

Phase 0 as-shipped (2026-10-02)

• Cash in person ships with a 5-minute default pay-by window, carried on the [FUND_COVENANT] message (payWindowSeconds).
• A pending request blocks its reference for the window (one active fund request per reference).
• The 5-minute value is a guess until the samples above exist — revisit per method.

Contributor Guidance

Skills needed: client instrumentation, access to testers across banks/regions
Estimated effort: 4-8 hours (instrumentation) + ongoing data collection
How to start: add the two timestamps to the payment flow and a small stats dump

Related Documents

• Payment Info Exchange
• Notification Bot

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