Technology Scaling – BitMEX on the Road to 100x

The BitMEX cryptocurrency derivatives exchange was launched in 2014 and currently averages daily trading volumes of US$3Bn. BitMEX built its matching and margining engine on kdb+ and cite the technology’s flexibility and speed in enabling them to pivot their product offerings twice: in the first instance from low-leverage inverse and quanto futures to high-leverage ones, and in the second case from high-leverage futures to its  flagship product, the XBTUSD Perpetual, which they proudly claim trades more than any crypto product in the world.

In a series of blogs the exchange talks about their goal to achieve “100x”  performance which the consistent coherency inside the BitMEX engine makes possible as kdb+ is fast enough to continuously remargin all positions upon each individual price change.  In this 2^nd posting they talk about how they have handled those unprecedented volumes  and provide a deep dive into overload/load shedding and problems inherent to horizontal scaling with practical insights into what can be parallelised and what must remain serial.

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