Towards Micropayment for Intermediary Based Trading

Involving an intermediary between producer-consumer environments is a common practice that reduces the managerial overhead on both parties. However, this mediation has both pros and cons. For example, it can overtake the power of producers in pricing, which could cause unfair revenue distribution. We present a novel micropayment protocol called MARI, which enables verifiable pricing and facilitates payment delegation for the prod-con environment. The proposed protocol is a blockchain-based unidirectional off-chain payment mechanism using a novel Merkel tree-based smart contract. MARI allows producers to communicate the fee structure directly to their consumers. It grants total control over producers' inbound payment flow, which an intermediary mediates and preserves the low overhead on the producers and consumers at the same time. Further, we explore how MARI meets the general requirements as a payment protocol and its scalability.