What is the correct way to implement sub-accounts within one master account?

Question

What is the correct way to implement a system with one master account that contains sub-accounts associated with individual users? Is it correct to use a Memo for every transaction that then associates funds with a specific user ID (the sub-account)?

The Reddit XLM tip-bot is an example of this account structure. To deposit funds to the tip-bot, you send lumens to the tip-bot's public address with your username as the Memo of the transaction. After depositing, you can then send lumens to any other users within the Stellar subreddit.

Answer 1

Your question is similar to how the stellar documentation describes customer accounts, which has two recommended methods:

1. Maintain a Stellar account for each customer. When a customer deposits money with your institution, you should pay an equivalent amount of your custom asset into the customer’s Stellar account from your base account. When a customer needs to obtain physical currency from you, deduct the equivalent amount of your custom asset from their Stellar account.

The functionality you describe the tip bot having actually seems pretty similar to the second method:

2. Use federation and the memo field in transactions to send and receive payments on behalf of your customers. In this approach, transactions intended for your customers are all made using your base account. The memo field of the transaction is used to identify the actual customer a payment is intended for.

So yes, that seems to be correct.