Quaestor

Quaestor is Hartsec's primary Financial Transaction Manager - a reconciled, auditable ledger for every payment your product touches. We support access to a managed public node that offers tiers restricted by requests per second or dedicated managed nodes that offer no restrictions.

Additionally, Hartsec offers integrations into a number of services for your needs, such as game servers or sites communicating over TCP. If we don't presently offer an integration into a publicly available service, contact us and we can make one for you. Alternatively, Hartsec is able to create an integration into your back-end service on demand.

Using Quaestor, you're provided with the following guarantees for every financial transaction:

• Prevention of any and all race conditions that may occur during transactions for multi-node instances

• Full ACID compliance so that your request is guaranteed to complete successfully or not at all.

Quaestor is generally split into two separate tiers:

1. Public Nodes - access to Hartsec's public instances of Quaestor located in different regions around the world

2. Managed Instances - instances of Quaestor that are hosted on your hardware but managed and monitored by Hartsec personnel

Public nodes are cheaper but provide less guarantees as to performance.

Auditability

Quaestor was designed with auditability in mind, akin to the historical elected officials of Quaestors of the Roman Republic - representing individuals who were charged with supervising the state treasury, and conducting audits or prosecuting capital cases in trials. If an incident occurs and Quaestor is unable to identify it and react accordingly, then Quaestor is failing.

To prevent this, every transaction tracks a number of details relating to it - this ranges from the obvious relevant accounts, to the channel that we received this transaction request through and the related branch. These details are easily accessible through the Quaestor CCI, can be directly exported to CSV or can otherwise be pulled down via Account Statements.

Integrity

Quaestor prioritises Integrity above performance and efficiency, rather than an added side-bonus. All transactional requests are performed with an Idempotency Key to verify that this is the first time that this request has been submitted. If we receive a request with a duplicate, we return the response provided for that particular request.

Additionally, thanks to our ACID-compliance, every request that receives a positive response can be guaranteed to have been completed in its entirety and without issue. To confirm this, every transaction goes through two series of checks - one during the initial transaction request, and again, when we move the transaction from PENDING to COMPLETED, where we verify the details once more and confirm that it is legitimate. Any transaction that does not pass the initial check does not receive a positive confirmation in the request - any that does not pass the second is automatically marked for fraud.

We verify every incoming request against a stored API key and IP address origin. If either do not match, we do not process the request.

To aid in our mission to maintain integrity, Quaestor has full support for business rules. If a transaction is performed that falls outside the bounds of these rules that you define, we reject it.

We support business rules of the following types:

• Daily (total dollar value over the last 24 hour period)

• Weekly (total dollar value over the last 7 day period)

• Monthly (total dollar value over the last monthly period)

• Yearly (total dollar value over the last 12 month period)

• Transaction (dollar value of the transaction)

• Balance (the balance of the sender or the recipient, as defined by the rule)

• Count Daily (total number of transactions over the last 24 hour period)

• Count Weekly (total number of transactions over the last 7 day period)

• Count Monthly (total number of transactions over the last monthly period)

• Count Yearly (total number of transactions over the last 12 month period)

• Count Global (total number of transactions since account creation)

All of the above rules support minimum and maximum values, and support referencing either the sender or the recipient of the transaction. Customisation of these limits can be done via the Quaestor CCI, or they can otherwise be configured on request by Hartsec support. These limits ensure that any rules that your business wants to set can be established, and your financial security maintained.

Multi-Bank

Quaestor can support multiple clients and economies on a single instance. Every "bank" (representing back-end client) operates on their own economy, own account blocks, and operate in total isolation from other clients. Cross-currency transactions can occur with the right extension, and can operate with approved exchange rates so that economies with different levels of inflation can still work with one another without concern and without integrating external applications.

Efficiency

While Quaestor puts an emphasis on the integrity and auditability of its' offerings, we can still offer high levels of efficiency for your transactional purposes. Quaestor utilises caching to improve the general efficiency and speed of all requests - balance enquiries operate on cached results, and as such often results in sub-millisecond response times. Transactions aim for <50 millisecond response times, but this can grow during times of increased load.

Under testing conditions with a constrained MariaDB database, Quaestor was able to perform ~3,400 transactions per second. Quaestor is fully capable of both horizontal and vertical scaling, and as such greater transaction speeds are expected with improved resource allocation.

It's highly recommended that use of caching software such as Valkey or Redis is used alongside Quaestor to improve response times. This will be configured as part of your license on purchase of a Managed Node license of Quaestor.

Integrations

Hartsec offers dedicated integrations into existing publicly-available services online. Upon purchase, we offer guides and our own configurations for you to manage these configurations and attach them into your chosen Quaestor node.

You may be interested in one of our more popular integrations, the Minecraft Integration. Contact us to purchase these two in a bundle.

Change Requests

Have a new feature that you would like to make this perfect for your environment? Certain tiers of Quaestor allow you to request a free small Change Request, meaning that you request it and we'll make sure that our integration works for you. Even if you're not on one of these tiers (or the CR is not small), contact us and we may be able to make it happen anyway, and we'll provide you with a quote.