Neutral Value Movement — Foundations of Rail-Agnostic Institutional Settlemen

Abstract

Abstract -This paper introduces and develops Neutral Value Movement (NVM) — a conceptual and operational framework in which the economic value of a financial instrument is deliberately decoupled from any single settlement rail, network, or ledger technology. Under an NVM posture, the identity, legal standing, and economic attributes of a financial claim are treated as properties of the instrument itself, not of the infrastructure through which it happens to be held or transferred at any given moment. The imperative for such a framework arises from the simultaneous coexistence of legacy central securities depository infrastructure (DTCC, Euroclear, Clearstream), permissioned distributed ledger platforms (JPMorgan Kinexys, Broadridge DLR, Canton Network), emerging public chain deployments (Ethereum Layer 2 networks), and conventional payment rails (Fedwire, SWIFT). In this fragmented landscape, the settlement of a cross-rail transaction today requires bespoke, bilateral engineering — an approach that scales neither operationally nor legally. This paper makes four principal contributions: (1) a rigorous definition of rail-agnostic settlement and its distinction from interoperability; (2) the concept of cross-chain equivalence and the Equivalence Certificate as a legal-technical construct; (3) the Canonical Digital Artifact as the foundational representational standard for multi-rail financial instruments; and (4) a Multi-Rail Governance Stack with