When Light-Speed Matters: Rethinking Finance for Distributed Markets

Abstract

Capital markets are built on synchronised clocks. This paper extends financial market theory into regimes where communication delays become economically significant: light cones replace synchronised time, causality bounds replace arbitrage bounds, and spacetime geometry shapes market structure.

The observation that light speed bears on markets is not new; a scattered literature has developed its fragments separately. This paper's contribution is synthesis and operationalisation: causal market regimes are formalised, institutional mechanisms are proposed on top of emerging off-Earth time standards, and an empirical agenda is set out as designs any researcher with the data can execute.