Order Without Custody

Small merchants already sell at scale — through chat threads, pages and a phone number painted on a wall — but they sell without a record. This paper argues that the binding constraint at that tier is not payment capability but reconciliation, and that reconcilability is an architectural property rather than a feature. Five mechanisms are formalised against artefacts a reader can inspect: the No-Custody Rail, Admission-Gated Discovery, Reserve-Ladder Scheduling, Surface-Disjoint Multi-Tenancy and the Constrained Persuasion Doctrine. The empirical section is forensic: five classes of governance failure, each stated as a signature, a detector and a design response.