ResiliPay: A Fault-Tolerant, Dual-Channel Cryptographic Payment Protocol for Intermittently Connected Economies
Abstract
Digital payment adoption across emerging economies has surged, yet contemporary architectures remain fundamentally brittle due to their strict reliance on continuous, low-latency telecommunications and synchronous centralized clearing switches. In countries such as Nigeria, recurring electrical grid collapses and cellular backhaul disruptions cause transaction failure rates between 10% and 15% during peak retail hours, imposing over ₦100 billion in annual deadweight losses across distributed agency banking networks. Existing offline proposals suffer from a fundamental trilemma: they either permit catastrophic offline double-spending, introduce delayed-settlement insolvency risks (unbacked overdrafts), or demand specialized, expensive smartcard hardware.
This paper presents ResiliPay, an asynchronous, offline-first cryptographic payment protocol designed to sustain retail commerce during total wide-area network and telecommunication partitions. ResiliPay combines client-side asymmetric cryptography (ECDSA P-256) with hardware-enforced monotonic counters and a Pre-Allocated Offline Escrow (POE) framework hosted inside mobile Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) to mathematically eliminate both offline double-spending and delayed-settlement insolvency without requiring distributed consensus. To bridge physical transport gaps under infrastructure failures, ResiliPay introduces an adaptive dual-channel serialization scheme: high-density optical Quick Response (QR) codes compacted by 72.4% (125 bytes, QR Version 6/8) for zero-connectivity proximity transactions, and an ultra-compact bit-packed binary encoding (86 bytes) that fits within a single GSM 7-bit SMS segment (<160 characters) for wide-area cellular fallback.
Furthermore, ResiliPay implements an order-independent reconciliation state machine utilizing sliding replay-window nonce sets, guaranteeing that out-of-order merchant batch uploads after regional grid restoration achieve 100% settlement precision without false replay rejections. Under a simulated post-blackout reconnection burst of 1,000 out-of-order merchant transactions with 50 injected adversarial replay attacks, ResiliPay achieves 100% settlement precision and 100% adversarial rejection in 176 ms (>5,600 settled tx/sec). We outline a pragmatic three-tier hardware security model spanning dedicated Secure Elements, ARM TrustZone with Replay Protected Memory Blocks (RPMB), and bank-underwritten micro-floats, providing an actionable blueprint for sovereign financial resilience in infrastructure-challenged economies.
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BibTeX
@misc{osinaka2026resilipay,
title = {{ResiliPay: A Fault-Tolerant, Dual-Channel Cryptographic Payment Protocol for Intermittently Connected Economies}},
author = {Brayan Osinaka},
howpublished = {Zenodo},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.5281/zenodo.23451944},
url = {https://zenodo.org/records/23451944},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - ResiliPay: A Fault-Tolerant, Dual-Channel Cryptographic Payment Protocol for Intermittently Connected Economies
AU - Brayan Osinaka
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/18
PB - Zenodo
DO - 10.5281/zenodo.23451944
UR - https://zenodo.org/records/23451944
AB - Digital payment adoption across emerging economies has surged, yet contemporary architectures remain fundamentally brittle due to their strict reliance on continuous, low-latency telecommunications and synchronous centralized clearing switches. In countries such as Nigeria, recurring electrical grid collapses and cellular backhaul disruptions cause transaction failure rates between 10% and 15% during peak retail hours, imposing over ₦100 billion in annual deadweight losses across distributed agency banking networks. Existing offline proposals suffer from a fundamental trilemma: they either permit catastrophic offline double-spending, introduce delayed-settlement insolvency risks (unbacked overdrafts), or demand specialized, expensive smartcard hardware. This paper presents ResiliPay, an asynchronous, offline-first cryptographic payment protocol designed to sustain retail commerce during total wide-area network and telecommunication partitions. ResiliPay combines client-side asymmetric cryptography (ECDSA P-256) with hardware-enforced monotonic counters and a Pre-Allocated Offline Escrow (POE) framework hosted inside mobile Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) to mathematically eliminate both offline double-spending and delayed-settlement insolvency without requiring distributed consensus. To bridge physical transport gaps under infrastructure failures, ResiliPay introduces an adaptive dual-channel serialization scheme: high-density optical Quick Response (QR) codes compacted by 72.4% (125 bytes, QR Version 6/8) for zero-connectivity proximity transactions, and an ultra-compact bit-packed binary encoding (86 bytes) that fits within a single GSM 7-bit SMS segment (<160 characters) for wide-area cellular fallback. Furthermore, ResiliPay implements an order-independent reconciliation state machine utilizing sliding replay-window nonce sets, guaranteeing that out-of-order merchant batch uploads after regional grid restoration achieve 100% settlement precision without false replay rejections. Under a simulated post-blackout reconnection burst of 1,000 out-of-order merchant transactions with 50 injected adversarial replay attacks, ResiliPay achieves 100% settlement precision and 100% adversarial rejection in 176 ms (>5,600 settled tx/sec). We outline a pragmatic three-tier hardware security model spanning dedicated Secure Elements, ARM TrustZone with Replay Protected Memory Blocks (RPMB), and bank-underwritten micro-floats, providing an actionable blueprint for sovereign financial resilience in infrastructure-challenged economies.
ER -