Request to accept
Acceptance is the drawee putting their signature on the obligation. Requesting it asks them to.
A bill can circulate without ever being accepted, but an unaccepted bill is a weaker instrument: the drawee has not yet acknowledged the debt, and a mint will not take one: minting requires an accepted bill.
Who may perform it
The holder.
Conditions
- The default rule: the bill can't be blocked, recoursed to the end, only recoursable, or paid.
- The bill can't already be accepted.
- The bill can't already be requested to accept.
The last two conditions are stated explicitly here, unlike for most actions, because acceptance is a one-shot path: once it has been requested, the request must resolve before anything else, and once it has been accepted or rejected, that is final.
Deadline
The holder sets a deadline. The floor is the UTC end of day of the request plus 48 hours; the drawee cannot be given less than that to respond.
While the request is open the bill is blocked. Three things can resolve it:
| Outcome | Result |
|---|---|
| The drawee accepts | the bill is accepted and unblocked |
| The drawee rejects | the bill becomes only recoursable |
| The deadline expires | the bill becomes only recoursable |
Note the asymmetry with an offer to sell: an expired offer to sell simply unblocks the bill, but an expired request to accept changes the bill's fate. From that point the only actions left are recourse actions.
Result
A RequestToAccept block, and a bill blocked waiting for acceptance.