The Cost-effective Management of Multiple E-Coupons on Public Ethereum-based Chains Using NFT Standard with Implicit Ownership

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.

电商市场高度依赖电子优惠券（e-coupon），但其数字化属性为搭建安全的电子优惠券基础设施带来了挑战，且该基础设施会产生维护成本。为解决上述问题，本研究探索将公有区块链（public blockchain）应用于电子优惠券系统，以此构建无需维护成本的高可靠去中心化基础设施。将优惠券信息存储于区块链上，可确保数据防篡改，并有效防止重复兑换。但采用公有区块链会将Gas费的承担责任转移至用户，若管理不当，可能对用户体验造成负面影响。本文聚焦于以太坊（Ethereum）系公链上的多电子优惠券高效成本管理方案，通过最小化存储读写操作实现该目标。本方案采用具备隐式所有权机制的非同质化代币（NFT，Non-Fungible Token）标准，完成优惠券的创建、流转及下架操作，并利用位图（bitmap）实现此类操作的高效执行。将优惠券信息存储于关联优惠券ID与持有者地址的映射表的闲置比特位中，以此确保执行电子优惠券业务逻辑时的交易成本更为经济。此外，本文提出的研究结论对于所有将服务或商品以NFT形式表征、并将特征嵌入单一存储槽位的平台均具有重要参考价值。