> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.cast.digitalfinancehq.com/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Reading list

> The research CAST builds on.

The ideas beneath CAST are not new in isolation. What is new is their combination — bilateral co-authorship, event sourcing, and cryptographic proof — applied to commercial payments at the moment AI makes verification the scarce resource.

## Economics

<Card title="Some Simple Economics of AGI" icon="scale-balanced">
  Catalini, Hui & Wu (MIT / WashU / UCLA, 2026). The verification-bottleneck thesis: as AI commoditizes execution, the verifiable share of economic activity becomes the primary driver of value. This is the macroeconomic foundation for proof-based authorization.
</Card>

## Accounting theory

<CardGroup cols={2}>
  <Card title="Sorter — Events theory of accounting" icon="bolt">
    The argument that the basic data of accounting should be events, not pre-aggregated balances. The intellectual root of event-sourced finance.
  </Card>

  <Card title="Ijiri — Triple-entry bookkeeping" icon="layer-group">
    Extending double-entry with a third dimension. CAST gives this a bilateral, cryptographically bound form.
  </Card>
</CardGroup>

## Distributed systems & cryptography

<CardGroup cols={2}>
  <Card title="Event sourcing" icon="clock-rotate-left">
    The pattern of treating an append-only log as the system of record, with all other state derived by projection.
  </Card>

  <Card title="Deterministic state machines" icon="diagram-project">
    The basis for the guarantee that the same events produce identical outputs for all parties.
  </Card>

  <Card title="WebAuthn / passkeys" icon="fingerprint">
    Hardware-backed identity binding — the mechanism that makes a confirmation non-repudiable.
  </Card>

  <Card title="Canonicalization & content hashing" icon="hashtag">
    Reproducible byte representations, so a signature made in 2026 still verifies in 2031.
  </Card>
</CardGroup>

<Note>
  This list is a starting frame, not the full bibliography. As Perspectives essays cite new sources, add them here so the reading list stays the canonical index of what CAST builds on.
</Note>