Bounded Temporal Fairness for FIFO Financial Markets

Financial exchange operators cater to the needs of their users while simultaneously ensuring compliance with the financial regulations. In this work, we focus on the operators' commitment for fair treatment of all competing participants. We first discuss unbounded temporal fairness and then investigate its implementation and infrastructure requirements for exchanges. We find that these requirements can be fully met only under ideal conditions and argue that unbounded fairness in FIFO markets is unrealistic. To further support this claim, we analyse several real-world incidents and show that subtle implementation inefficiencies and technical optimizations suffice to give unfair advantages to a minority of the participants. We finally introduce, {\epsilon}-fairness, a bounded definition of temporal fairness and discuss how it can be combined with non-continuous market designs to provide equal participant treatment with minimum divergence from the existing market operation

Global distribution of sediment-hosted metals controlled by craton edge stability

Sustainable development and the transition to a clean-energy economy drives ever-increasing demand for base metals, substantially outstripping the discovery rate of new deposits and necessitating dramatic improvements in exploration success. Rifting of the continents has formed widespread sedimentary basins, some of which contain large quantities of copper, lead and zinc. Despite over a century of research, the geological structure responsible for the spatial distribution of such fertile regions remains enigmatic. Here, we use statistical tests to compare deposit locations with new maps of lithospheric thickness, which outline the base of tectonic plates. We find that 85% of sediment-hosted base metals, including all giant deposits (>10 megatonnes of metal), occur within 200 kilometres of the transition between thick and thin lithosphere. Rifting in this setting produces greater subsidence and lower basal heat flow, enlarging the depth extent of hydrothermal circulation available for forming giant deposits. Given that mineralization ages span the past two billion years, this observation implies long-term lithospheric edge stability and a genetic link between deep Earth processes and near-surface hydrothermal mineral systems. This discovery provides an unprecedented global framework for identifying fertile regions for targeted mineral exploration, reducing the search space for new deposits by two-thirds on this lithospheric thickness criterion alone