Liquidity Coupling: Algorithmic Settlement Rails for the Agentic Economy

Liquidity Coupling formalizes the economic settlement layer required when autonomous agents are the primary economic actors. We present an algorithmic framework for bilateral and multilateral obligation clearing — the Settlement Coupling Graph (SCG) — and prove that it prevents systemic liquidity failure in high-throughput agentic economies under bounded agent rationality. The framework supports atomic multi-party settlement with finality guarantees that scale sub-linearly in transaction volume.