Flake IDs

PayNow uses Snowflake IDs (shorted to "flake" in our system) for everything that requires a unique identifier. These IDs are unique across the entire system.

Because our implementation uses signed 64-bit integers (int64), they are always returned as a strings in our API to prevent overflows in inferior languages. In our documentation we label ID fields with the flake type. When calling routes that expect a flake, you should always send it in string form.

Flake ID in Binary

sign  timestamp                                  node       increment
0     11111111111111111111111111111111111111111  1111111111 111111111111
64    63                                         22         12          0

PayNow Epoch

The timestamp component is offset by an epoch.

Unix ms: 1645568542000
ISO8601: 2022-02-22T22:22:22.000Z

Convert ID to time:

TimeFromUnixMillis((id >> 22) + epoch)