Invoice Factoring Registration Based on a Public Blockchain

Invoice factoring is a very useful tool for developing businesses that face liquidity problems. The main property that a factoring system needs to fulfill is to prevent an invoice from being factored twice. In order to prevent double factoring, many factoring ecosystems use one or several centralized entities to register factoring agreements. However, this puts a lot of power in the hands of these centralized entities and makes it difficult for users to dispute situations in which factoring data is unavailable, wrongly recorded or manipulated by negligence or on purpose. In this article, we propose an architecture for invoice factoring registration based on a public blockchain. To solve the aforementioned drawbacks, we replace the trusted third parties for factoring registration with a smart contract. Using a smart contract, we record digital evidence of the terms and conditions of factoring agreements in explicit detail, allowing auditability and dispute resolution. Relevant information is highly available on the blockchain while its privacy is protected. The registration is optimal, since it needs only one blockchain transaction and one key-value storage per invoice factoring.