Idempotency

Category: science

The property of an operation whereby it can be applied multiple times without changing the result beyond the initial application.

Idempotency is the "safety lock." If a user clicks "Submit" twice, a non-idempotent system might charge them twice. An idempotent system knows the first transaction happened and ignores the second. It’s critical for all payments and status updates.

Common Examples

• Our API is strictly idempotent; repeated requests to the "Create Policy" endpoint will not result in duplicate records in the ledger.
• Implementing idempotency at the API level is the primary defense against double-charging during network-timeout re-tries.