Engineering Digital Trade Instruments

Join us for an upcoming research seminar held by Dr. Philipp Zahn exploring the design of digital trade instruments from a rigorous engineering and economic standpoint.

This session approaches short-term credit and payment obligations: formally specified systems that coordinate incentives, information, and settlement across multiple parties under uncertainty.

The talk examines the underlying primitives and design choices required to construct legally robust, economically sound, and computationally verifiable trade instruments in a digital setting.
This session will explore:
• The economic and legal foundations of trade instruments as transferable payment obligations
• Mechanism design challenges in multi-party, multi-tier trade environments
• Formal modeling of lifecycle events: issuance, transfer, netting, default, and settlement
• How token-engineering methods (specification, simulation, stress-testing) can be applied to real-economy credit mechanisms
• Implications for market design, risk allocation, and information flow in digitally mediated trade finance

The seminar is aimed at researchers and practitioners interested in mechanism design, applied cryptography, market engineering, and the interface between legal institutions and programmable financial systems.