Transaction Lifecycle

What this explains

Most blockchain explainers stop at 'a transaction gets mined.' For a real-world settlement rail, that's not enough. The buyer needs to know when funds release. The supplier needs to know when payment is final. Finance needs to know when the receipt is auditable. Compliance needs to know when the fee was burned. This page walks through what each of those moments looks like in the chain, in order.

EDMA runs two rails on the same lifecycle. Trade milestones flow through proof and release. Token settlements (energy certificates, carbon credits, ESG attachments) flow through buy and settle. Both share the same gate, the same burn mechanic, and the same anchoring. The diagram below shows the Trade path because it has more stages; Tokens is a shorter variant that ends at fee + burn + receipt.

The whole point of this design is that the business clock and the chain clock are decoupled. Your team feels operational finality in seconds. Ethereum finality follows minutes later. You never wait on L1 to move trucks or record cash, and you never have to choose between speed and auditability.

The Trade rail, step by step

1. 01

   Trigger: attestor submits the evidence

   An attestor submits a normalized event (BL + seal photo, COA, customs clearance, telemetry window). The buyer gets a short review window (0 to 4 hours, set per corridor) to block if something is off. If the buyer doesn't block, the system moves to the gate.

2. 02

   Gate: PoV runs three checks

   The PoV gate runs Attestation Quorum (>=2 distinct roles, AUDITOR required), Equality (all attestors signed the same hash), and One-Claim Exclusivity (hash not previously finalised anywhere). All three must pass. If any fails, the stage stops here. No mint, no settle, no state change. Lineage is append-only on-chain.

3. 03

   Mint: EMT for the stage

   On gate-pass, the EMT (EDMA Milestone Token) contract mints the token for that stage, in the same L2 block. The EMT is the on-chain proof that this milestone has cleared. No EMT, no funds. That's the constitutional rule.

4. 04

   Release: Locked → Unlocked EDSD

   The Treasury contract flips the corresponding EDSD slice from Locked to Unlocked. The supplier sees the funds available immediately. Funded-on-proof assignments tied to that stage settle automatically; subcontractors get paid in the same transaction.

5. 05

   Fee: protocol fee posts, 50% burns

   The Fee Router applies the corridor's fee schedule (e.g., 0.5% per stage for trade, capped) and splits the proceeds: 50% to the burn address in $EDM, 50% to the treasury. The burn transaction is included in the same receipt and gets its own on-chain hash.

6. 06

   Receipt: dual artifacts

   Both sides (buyer and supplier) receive a human-readable receipt and a link to the public proof page. The receipt shows the EMT id, the PoV hash, the fee line, the burn hash, and the net amount. Webhooks fire for ERP integrations (trade.milestone.passed, trade.release.posted, fee.burn.posted).

7. 07

   Anchor: batched to Ethereum

   Within 2 to 10 minutes, the L2 block containing this lifecycle gets batched into an EIP-4844 blob and posted to Ethereum, together with a new state root. Day-to-day operations don't wait for L1; the receipt is already operational truth on L2. But for any auditor who wants to verify independently, the L1 anchor is now in place.

What can go wrong, and what happens