A transfer chain is what makes ecological transfer far harder to measure than a single boundary crossing: transfer propagates. An automation displaces labor; the local tax base falls; schools deteriorate; young people leave; local businesses close; political extremism rises. The original transfer was labor, but the eventual effect was a community’s entire ecology, and no measurement that stops at the first hop will ever see it.
So the architecture has to trace source → transfer → recipient → secondary transfer → systemic effect, which is naturally a graph rather than a single ledger line — likely one of the more technically interesting parts of the whole project. It is also why counterfactual reasoning and long time horizons matter: the most important consequence of a transfer is often several steps and several years downstream of the act that caused it.