Background Terrestrial financial market infrastructure (FMIs) — central counterparties (CCPs), real-time gross settlement (RTGS) systems, and custodial registries — presuppose low communication latency, jurisdictional coherence, and on-site enforcement capacity. None of these presuppositions hold in multi-planetary commercial environments: Earth–Moon communication involves minutes of latency, Earth–Mars involves 4–24 minutes one-way plus periodic blackouts, and no enforcement body with on-site power exists off-Earth. Existing legal and financial paradigms provide no composable settlement infrastructure for this environment. Gap The Named Binary distinguishing Terrestrial-Transplant Settlement Models (TTSM) from Latency-Adapted Layered Settlement (LALS) does not appear in the space economics literature. No formal framework derives the necessary and sufficient architectural components of off-world financial infrastructure from the physical and institutional constraints of interplanetary commerce, specifies the formal conditions under which each layer is required, or identifies the IGT threshold at which provisional claim markets become self-sustaining. Approach We derive the architecture of a Latency-Adapted Layered Settlement (LALS) regime from four foundational constraints: communication latency, custody ambiguity, jurisdictional absence, and enforcement asymmetry. We formalise the four-layer architecture, specify the formal conditions under which each layer is necessary, derive the economic consequences (latency premia, custodial intermediation markets, accreditation requirements), ground the framework in Internal-Geometry Threshold (IGT) theory, confirm structural invariance across three independent institutional domains, specify a pre-registerable Collapse Counter-Scenario, and provide a Weil Protocol practitioner review pack. Results The LALS architecture — comprising local operational custody, provisional cryptographically-attested claims, time-bounded global netting with latency-calibrated dispute windows, and independent enforcement backstops — is the minimum necessary architecture for multi-planetary commerce above a settlement volume threshold V*. Below V*, bilateral pre-funded escrow with private arbitration may suffice. Above V*, the system contamination index Cₛettle (the probability that a settlement failure propagates to a cascade across the multi-planetary network) exceeds acceptable thresholds without the full LALS architecture. Three structural precursors of the V* transition are identified and specified as monitoring instruments. Implications Multi-planetary commerce requires coordinated action across four institutional domains before private commerce can scale: technical standards for tamper-evident custody hardware and DTN attestation; financial standards for pre-funded default pool sizing; legal frameworks for provisional claim recognition and arbitration; and governance instruments for multi-actor cost allocation. Weil Protocol practitioner review from space law, FMI design, and DTN engineering experts is required before the numeric thresholds are adopted as policy standards.
José Caetano de Mattos (Tue,) studied this question.