Price settlement need not exhaust transaction completion. A transaction can be fully settled in price yet still be publicly incomplete. The missing object is not a delayed payoff. It is the transaction’s public continuation set: the continuation arrangements an institution can publicly recognize and implement because of a transaction under the effective public rule package. A delayed settlement belongs to completion if and only if settling it changes that set. This excludes delayed bonuses, revocable scores, and other nearby outputs that may matter financially or behaviorally but do not become public, rule-bound, continuation-changing claim settlements. Once that primitive is corrected, three questions become unavoidable. Which delayed settlements belong to completion at all? When do such settlements enter public completion rather than remain merely executed, informative, or discretionary? And once those public requirements are imposed, what exact public completion predicate survives? The answer is necessarily two-layered. A transaction is publicly complete only when price settlement is final and every completion-relevant claim settlement attached to the transaction has been settled in a completion-ready and final manner. The resulting exact public representation is minimally generated by price-settlement status, a code of transaction-conditioned continuation consequences, and second-layer settled status. The same architecture has two further consequences. First, outside collapse cases, the inherited one-layer view pools long-run states that completion-grade two-layer settlement can separate, creating a strictly positive pooling burden and, under hard budgets, feasible-set loss. Second, if the semantics governing treatment can drift silently, then semantics-based treatment status and timing need not exist as public time-(t) objects at all. The analysis is descriptive and limited to transaction-linked, externally verifiable, user-facing settlement environments. This is a public-object problem, not a delayed-payoff refinement.
Topo Labs CY (Thu,) studied this question.