Blockchain Settlement — 276 pages, 16 chapters in three parts. The diagnosis of a broken post-trade stack, the technology that fixes it, and the regulated systems already running it in production.
A trade executed at 9:01 on a Monday won't finally settle until Wednesday afternoon — if it settles at all. Each layer of the post-trade stack adds time, cost and risk.
Exchange or ATS order matching — the only step that happens at market speed.
Affirmation and reconciliation between counterparties — the first place errors creep in.
SSI matching and fails management across a chain of intermediaries.
Novation, netting and margin — the central counterparty absorbs the risk the delay creates.
Book-entry transfer at T+1/T+2. DTCC alone processes 99%+ of US equity settlement; Euroclear holds $37T in custody.
Chapter 3 writes the design specification for an ideal settlement system — the yardstick the rest of the book measures everything against.
Four decades of compression — each step down the cycle removes an order of magnitude of pre-settlement credit exposure.
Settlement backlogs forced the NYSE to close on Wednesdays in 1968; the DTC was founded in 1973 to cope.
After the G30 report (1989), Black Monday and Barings underscored the systemic risk of long windows.
EU CSDR harmonised T+2; the US followed in 2017 — still leaving ~$1.7T of daily counterparty exposure.
US, Canada, Mexico and Argentina moved together on May 28, 2024 — eliminating $1.7T of daily exposure.
India's NSE runs optional T+0; SDX settles in real time. Execution and settlement coincide — the risk window disappears.
How a trade settles; what goes wrong (fails, cascade risk, Lehman, $40B reconciliation); and the eight-criteria design spec.
Distributed ledgers from Pacioli to Nakamoto; SHA-256 & ECDSA; consensus (PoW, PoS, PBFT); smart contracts; architecture (Fabric, Corda); tokenization to $16T by 2030.
Regulation (MiFID II, CSDR, DLT Pilot Regime); governance; what has been built; honest limitations; working Python & Solidity; and the road ahead.
Chapters 14–15 ship runnable implementations, not pseudocode — a Python settlement simulation and a Solidity DVP contract.