ERC-948

ERC-948 was a proposal, raised in 2018 by developers in the Ethereum community, for a standard method of making recurring subscription payments with tokens. Blockchain payments are normally "push" payments that the payer must sign each time, so there is no direct equivalent of a card-on-file charge or a direct debit. ERC-948 explored letting a user authorize a merchant, or a contract acting for them, to pull a fixed amount at set intervals, with the ability to cancel at any time, so that services could offer monthly billing in crypto. Several designs were debated, including signed meta-transactions and approvals with time limits, but the proposal never progressed to a final standard. The problem it tackled has since been addressed in other ways, notably through account abstraction under ERC-4337, whose smart accounts can grant limited, rule-based spending permissions for recurring payments.