Operational knowledge map

Explains why on-chain payment detection is not settlement finality or books-ready recognition, and how merchants should separate detection, policy confirmation, and reconciliation gates.

Explains operational drift between planes, settlement checkpoint guardrails, and bounded recovery playbooks grounded in verified provider events.

Documents escalation when payments fail settlement checkpoints—owners, evidence requirements, and forbidden informal overrides.

Covers signed webhook verification over raw request bytes, idempotent handlers, and mapping verified events to explicit lifecycle states—not informal paid flags.

Covers replay protection, duplicate suppression, out-of-order delivery, and provider retry semantics beyond raw-body signature verification.

Describes reconciliation as merchant-owned mapping between commerce, provider lifecycle signals, and finance records—with exception queues instead of silent posting.

Defines structured exception classes—amount, reference, timing, and rail mismatches—with owned queues and auditable resolution instead of informal overrides.

Maps commerce, provider lifecycle, and finance reconciliation planes with explicit matchers and tolerances—without collapsing detection into books-ready finality.

Defines evidence packages for reconciliation audits—payment_id trails, verified provider events, matcher outcomes, and finance posting metadata.

Explains reconciling delayed settlement with intermediate lifecycle states, timing-skew exceptions, and finance holds—not single paid flags.

Defines production infrastructure as layered server-side trust boundaries, lifecycle semantics, and bounded rails—not checkout widgets or marketing feature lists.

Frames USDT merchant flows with treasury recognition, network abstraction, and the operational distinction between settlement and payout requests.