The Cost-Effective Management of Multiple E-Coupons on Public Ethereum-Based Chains Using NFT Standard With Implicit Ownership

Abstract

The e-commerce market heavily relies on e-coupons, and their digital nature presents challenges in establishing a secure e-coupon infrastructure, which incurs maintenance costs. To address this, we explore using public blockchains for the e-coupon system, providing a highly reliable decentralized infrastructure with no maintenance costs. Storing coupon information on a blockchain ensures tamper resistance and protection against double redemption. However, using public blockchains shifts gas cost responsibility to users, potentially impacting user experience if not managed carefully. This paper focuses on cost-effective management of multiple e-coupons on Ethereum-based chains by minimizing reading and writing to storage. It applies the NFT standard with implicit ownership for creating, transferring, and removing coupons from circulation, utilizing bitmaps for efficient execution of these operations. Coupon information is stored in unused bits of a mapping that associates coupon id with the owner’s address, ensuring more economical transaction for executing e-coupon business logic. Additionally, the findings outlined in this paper hold significance to all platforms that represents services or goods as NFTs, embedding features in a single storage slot.

Keywords

• Blockchain
• e-coupon
• NFT
• security
• smart contract