Talos – Using Aeron & SBE for an institutional crypto trading technology platform

A Look at Talos’s Architecture: Building a High-Performance Crypto Trading Technology Platform with Aeron

The world of cryptocurrency is fast-paced and ever-evolving. For institutional investors looking to enter this dynamic market, having a reliable and efficient trading technology platform is crucial. In this blog post, we’ll delve into the Aeron-based architecture powering Talos, a leading institutional crypto trading technology platform.

Talos: A One-Stop Shop for Crypto Trading Technology

Talos simplifies the complexities of crypto trading by offering a comprehensive institutional technology platform. Clients can connect to the entire digital assets ecosystem – exchanges, market makers, and custodians – through a single API and user interface (UI). This eliminates the need to juggle multiple platforms for trading and settlement, a unique advantage in the digital asset space.

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The Foundation: Aeron and Simple Binary Encoding

Talos leverages Aeron Transport, a high-performance messaging framework that ensures low-latency communication across its platform. Talos also uses Simple Binary Encoding (SBE), by the Aeron team, for efficient message serialization. Thanks to SBE’s compact data representation and advanced management of data structures, message processing within Talos is significantly accelerated, complementing the speed and reliability provided by Aeron.

Additionally, Talos has built a market data redistribution protocol based on Aeron messaging, enabling efficient data distribution across cloud and co-located environments.

The Heart of the System: The Sequencer Architecture

The core of Talos’s architecture is a sequencer built using Aeron Transport and Aeron Archive components. This architecture allows Talos to construct a platform with several key advantages:

• Low-latency Execution: Talos capitalizes on the power of a sequencer to orchestrate a network of independent microservices that communicate asynchronously, ensuring operations are executed with sub-millisecond latency. This is made possible by the integration of Aeron, which is specifically tailored to meet the demanding low-latency requirements of their business operations.
• Always-on functionality: Crypto markets operate 24/7, and downtime is simply not an option. Talos’s architecture is designed for high availability, ensuring continuous operation.
• State recovery and fault tolerance: Even the most robust systems can encounter issues. Talos’s sequencer architecture facilitates state recovery and fault tolerance, allowing the platform to bounce back quickly from unexpected events.
• Seamless upgrades: Upgrading a complex platform can be disruptive. Talos’s sequencer architecture allows for zero-downtime upgrades, so that users can access new features and functionalities without experiencing any disruption to their trading experience.
• Easy monitoring and debugging: Troubleshooting issues can be time-consuming. The sequencer architecture simplifies monitoring and debugging by providing a centralized view of the message flow.

Conclusion

Talos’s architecture, built on Aeron and Simple Binary Encoding, is a testament to open-source technologies’ power in creating robust and efficient trading platforms. Aeron enables the development of reliable, high-performance systems in the cloud for high-volume, 24/7 trading.

Ethan Feldman
Co-Founder, CTO
Talos

Ethan is the co-founder and CTO at Talos. Prior to Talos, he spent a decade at Broadway Technology building high performance trading platforms used by some of the largest financial institutions. Ethan holds a BA and MEng in Computer Science from Cornell University. Likes real-time systems and tacos.

Talos is the leading provider of digital asset trading infrastructure for institutions. They empower institutional investors, such as asset managers, hedge funds, and prime brokers, to participate in the crypto market with confidence. Their platform offers streamlined connectivity, low-latency execution, advanced order routing and algorithmic trading, robust risk management & deterministic state machines with active-active replication.