Fun fact; back when I worked in finance (2015-2017), forex trades including Bitcoin actually settled slower than anything else by about a day. Our pipelines had to detect crypto trades in order to fix the expected settlement date.
Not clear to me. I wasn’t involved in settlement; it was just my job to make sure the system reflected external reality. In the case of BTC trades we were just told what the system did, not why. It also was a relatively simple “crypto trades settle in 2 days” algorithm which didn’t require a lot of investigation on our part.
I will say that a lot of finance stuff is driven by norms and history, and it can be surprisingly hard to change things. My favorite example is the British “gilt” bond. Most government bonds have “coupon” days where interest is paid out, and obviously the traders of these bonds like to calculate the accrual of interest between them when trading. Gilt bonds, so named from the gilded edge the paper used to have, pays out the coupon to whoever has the bond a few days before coupon day because in the 1600s it took a lot of effort to figure out who actually had the physical bond paper. Back when I worked in finance they still had this system from nearly 400 years ago. Obviously the ability to sell a bond and still collect the coupon wreaks absolute havoc with the interest calculation.
