Systems and methods are provided for passing control of message dependencies and ordering to one or more network nodes participating in a transaction. Thus, messages can be sent to the participating nodes and the participating nodes can handle the messages according to their respective dependencies without first sending a response or waiting for the next message to arrive. In one embodiment, at least one message is flagged with a checkpoint to indicate that messages sent before the checkpoint are to be handled by the participating nodes before messages after the checkpoint. Messages may also be flagged with error-handling information. For example, a message may be marked to indicate that if the message fails, no further messages are to be sent to the node had the failure. Responses to a group of messages can be collected in a single operation.