KX Helps Global Digital-Asset Trading Firm Eliminated Duplicate Market-Data Costs and Unified Its Trading Stack

The Customer

The customer is a global digital-asset and blockchain technology company operating across crypto trading, asset management and financial services, with billions of dollars in assets under management and offices across major financial hubs in the US, Europe, and Asia. The firm has been rapidly building institutional-grade infrastructure, bringing in capital markets veterans and moving toward the sophistication of a modern systematic hedge fund. Its trading desks run strategies including statistical arbitrage and semi-systematic trading across digital assets and equities, all of which demand real-time, high-performance data.

The Challenge

The firm’s existing setup couldn’t keep pace with the velocity and complexity of its business, on either side of the trade, with challenges including:

• A fragmented data pipeline, with inconsistent schemas and symbol mapping across feeds, and storage and compute strained by growing data volumes
• Siloed tooling, including a general-purpose data platform, a cloud time series database, and a legacy market-data provider, leading to different desks often paying for the same market-data feeds independently
• No central data repository, driving latency and duplicated effort across teams
• Post-trade processes, including transaction cost analysis (TCA) and end-of-day reporting, constrained by infrastructure not built for crypto-speed markets and volumes
• Pre-trade capabilities, including signal generation, backtesting, and research-to-execution workflows, limited by the same gaps, with no unified view across market impact, depth-of-book, and funding analytics

Why the Firm Chose KX

Following a rigorous evaluation, the firm selected KX because of:

• Proven performance at scale during periods of extreme volatility
• A single source for historical and real-time data, instead of a patchwork of systems
• End-to-end data and analytics capabilities, not just storage
• A microservice-based architecture that speeds time to value and eases integration
• Deep capital markets experience combined with digital-asset domain understanding
• Enterprise-grade governance and deployment options

The Solution

The firm runs its trading analytics and its market data on KX, with a single foundation for:

• Transaction cost analysis (TCA) and execution quality analytics
• Market impact and slippage measurement
• Depth-of-book and real-time fill-quality monitoring
• A semi-systematic trading stack, including statistical arbitrage strategies drawing on three-plus years of historical data alongside real-time streaming feeds
• Continuous storage of features, forecasts, and model states, with parallel model training and forecast publication in tens of milliseconds
• Real-time monitoring of alpha decay, slippage, and execution quality
• Real-time ingest from major crypto exchanges and a leading market-data provider, ingesting up to 1.5TB a day, stored in one-minute bars
• A migration of 15–25TB of historical digital-asset data onto the same platform
• Quant workflows running in Python and Jupyter notebooks directly on top of KX, feeding the firm’s downstream trading systems
• A single source for historical and real-time market data, in place of a patchwork of feeds and providers

OneTick Market Data flows directly into kdb+ alongside the firm’s trading data, so research, historical analysis, and real-time decisions all draw on the same platform. That means faster onboarding of new data sources, less time spent reconciling systems, and one place to look for answers no matter the question. With time-to-market as the firm’s top priority, the platform was built to get them there fast, without asking them to trade away the high availability their trading desks depend on.

The Outcome

The firm now runs its trading analytics and its market data on a single platform, unifying crypto spot and derivatives microstructure, on-chain activity and liquidity metrics, fundamental protocol data, and institutional pricing and execution data across venues, all in real time, across every venue it trades on.

If your team is scaling into new markets or reconciling real-time and historical data across separate systems, explore OneTick Market Data and KDB-X , or book a demo to talk through your setup.