A Digital Asset Exchange: Metrological Foundations and Institutional Framework for Organized Trading in Software Products, Computational Resources, and Usage Time

This paper presents a conceptual and formal framework for an organized exchange market in digital assets, including software usage time, computational resources, and storage capacity. The central problem addressed is the absence of a standardized unit of account, objective utility metric, clearing mechanism, and insurable contract structure for assets that are otherwise highly reproducible, divisible, and suitable for exchange trading. The paper introduces the person-hour of digital resource utilization as a proposed base unit of account and defines a formal metric of applied informational utility, ΔU = log₂(S_before / S_after), based on reduction of the solution space within a normalized reference environment. It distinguishes several classes of digital products, including Solver, Filter, Accelerator, and Attention Retention systems, and links their valuation to lifecycle utility, technological obsolescence, market reach, user switching costs, and network effects. The framework further describes the institutional components required for exchange trading: standardized digital-use contracts, independent reproducible auditing, mandatory insurance against non-delivery and performance defects, clearing and settlement rules, broker-mediated lot formation, and a secondary market for unused software access rights. It also discusses how time-based microlicensing may reduce the economic rationality of software piracy by offering low-friction legal access to limited usage intervals. The proposed model is theoretical and institutional rather than empirical. Its purpose is to define a minimum architecture for treating software products, compute capacity, and storage time as liquid, insurable, and creditworthy exchange-traded assets. Individual parameters, including obsolescence coefficients, baseline selection methods, insurance premia, and market reach filters, require further empirical calibration.