Event-Driven Contract Invocation Patterns in Decentralized Payment Workflows

Abstract

Decentralized payment workflows deployed during the early Ethereum Frontier and Homestead eras relied heavily on event-driven invocation patterns, where smart contracts emitted structured logs that external settlement observers used to trigger multi-step financial state transitions. This architecture reduced on-chain gas costs and minimized persistent state updates, but introduced new correctness dependencies on off-chain watchers, reorganization-safe confirmation policies, and idempotent release logic to prevent race conditions and re-entrancy risks. By examining log emission semantics, bloom-filter-based discovery, and client-side settlement orchestration, this work provides a foundational analysis of how event-driven coordination enabled scalable payment execution while preserving on-chain finality guarantees.