Zero-Cost Data Storage in Financial Market Microstructure
Limit orderbooks maintain authenticated, persistent state that can be read only with the account holder's API credentials. We show this state is a zero-cost information-storage medium: unfilled limit orders placed in safe price zones lock margin temporarily but never execute, preserving principal while encoding data in price–quantity pairs. We formalize the Market Storage Channel, derive Shannon capacity bounds of up to roughly 130 KB across twenty trading pairs, and implement a seven-layer privacy architecture with AES-256-GCM encryption — establishing financial infrastructure as a novel, censorship-resistant storage substrate.