Research in Causality-Bounded Finance
Examining how finite information propagation affects market structure, efficiency, and design, with applications from infrastructure finance to interplanetary commerce.
The Space Finance Institute is an independent research initiative examining how physical constraints on information transmission shape financial markets and economic systems.
The work follows the implications of finite-speed communication into market microstructure, regulatory design and institutional frameworks. The questions bear on infrastructure-dependent markets that exist now, not only on distributed economies that do not yet.
The method is theoretical and empirical in roughly equal measure, and borrows from finance, physics and institutional economics as each is needed, with the aim of building frameworks that hold when the physical limits on market design are taken seriously.
The Institute is the research initiative of Daniel Cheah, an Australian structured-finance practitioner. The working method is the structurer's: source proven components from any discipline, add only the missing part, and require the problem to close like a deal. Current work applies that method to financing structures for space assets.
Our research programme addresses how communication constraints affect financial markets across multiple dimensions:
Mathematical frameworks for understanding market behaviour when information propagation is finite and predictable.
How communication infrastructure affects market efficiency, with applications to network disruptions and infrastructure valuation.
Policy implications of latency-based market asymmetries and institutional design for physically-constrained markets.
Financial system design for extreme-latency environments, from satellite networks to future interplanetary commerce.
The tools come from wherever they work: quantitative finance and econophysics for the pricing questions, network theory and institutional economics for the design ones.
The Orbital Asset Registry gives every catalogued object in Earth orbit a permanent identity, then answers the questions a financier asks of collateral: who operates it, whether that operator still exists, which state answers for it under the space treaties, and how the object ended. Some 70,000 objects are catalogued, around 13,000 payloads are resolved to an operating company, and end-of-life events, including operator-admitted disposal failures, are read from operators' own regulatory filings and reconciled back to the catalogue.
Since August 2026 the Registry also carries independent verification: community optical observations checked against its own orbital record, and reception data from a volunteer ground-station network recording when an object was last heard transmitting. Both are gathered outside the primary catalogue's own feed.
The Registry is the applied arm of this research programme: where the papers work out how financial claims behave under physical constraint, the Registry supplies the reference data those claims would have to be written against. Every record carries its source, retrieval date and content hash; inference is marked as inference and never published as record. It is independent and privately operated, with no governmental or intergovernmental status.
About the Registry →A living map of the finance-under-physical-constraint literature: the works, the people who wrote them, and the connections that should exist but don't, which is the part citation databases cannot show. Discovery is automated weekly; every entry and every edge is curated by hand, and missing-citation edges carry written justifications.
Map data is licensed CC BY and machine-readable. Suggestions of works that belong on the map are welcome.
Explore the Observatory →A framework for financial markets constrained by finite-speed information propagation. The paper restates no-arbitrage under causal filtrations, proves an obstruction result on which dynamics can carry martingale prices, and derives an operational bound on arbitrage reach together with the hedging cost of communication blackouts. The framework converges to classical finance as information speed grows without bound.
View on SSRN → Download PDF →This paper extends financial market theory into regimes where communication delays become economically significant. We demonstrate how relativistic causality constraints create distinct market regimes where traditional no-arbitrage conditions cannot hold, propose institutional mechanisms for distributed economies, and outline an empirical research agenda with applications from submarine cable finance to interplanetary commerce.
View on SSRN → Download PDF →A machine-readable dataset of responsibility for objects whose owners no longer exist. Liability for a space object does not lapse when its launching state does, so a responsible party exists today for every satellite still catalogued under the Soviet Union or Czechoslovakia. The catalogue simply does not say who. The paper maps historical catalogue codes to the parties liable today under five relationship types, each determination carrying effective dates, legal citations and documented caveats. The dataset is integrated into the Orbital Asset Registry.
View on SSRN → Download PDF →Current work applies securitisation practice to space assets: financing structures that must function where collateral cannot be observed or repossessed during transit.
The Space Finance Institute welcomes collaboration and dialogue with researchers, practitioners, and institutions interested in the physical foundations of financial markets.
Partner on research that runs across finance, physics and institutional design.
Expert consultation on market infrastructure, latency-based market design, and regulatory frameworks.
Commentary on infrastructure finance, market structure, and regulatory implications of communication constraints.
Enquiries: danielcheah@spacefi.institute