Case Study: Developing a digital asset trading platform with Aeron Sequencer

A leading digital asset trading firm, the trading and custody arm of a major financial services company, has embraced crypto in a big way. But to lead in a 24/7 market, they needed to move beyond their legacy technology stack.

The challenge: Architecting an always on 24/7 digital assets platform at scale

The firm had an existing trading platform built for traditional products, unfortunately it was a decade old with a monolithic architecture built on point-to-point messaging and databases. While it worked, it wasn’t designed for the demands of a 24/7, high-volume market. It was fragile, difficult to maintain, and lacked the scalability needed for growth.

In the words of an executive at the company, “if one thing goes down, basically you have a bunch of people jumping on and trying to figure out what’s going on”.
This reactive approach was unsustainable and affected the ability to innovate. The firm needed an “always-on” trading system designed for the future.

The company hence decided to take a greenfield approach i.e. rather than heavily modifying the legacy system, it took the opportunity to build a platform from the ground up using modern event-based trading technology.

Their goals were clear:

• 24/7 market operations: Build a platform capable of continuous trading.
• Throughput & low latency: Be able to handle millions of messages per second with predictable, microsecond-level latency.
• Operational resilience: Ensure extreme stability and autonomous failover to reduce operational risk.
• Business agility: Create a platform that can evolve and scale as their business ambitions grow.
• Rich operational tooling: Enable real-time monitoring of all system events and facilitate issue rectification.

The choice: Building on top of a modern, event-driven architecture

After evaluating building in-house, buying off-the-shelf, and outsourcing, the firm chose a hybrid “buy and build” approach, partnering with Adaptive. This allowed them to leverage Adaptive’s deep industry expertise and technology platform while maintaining control over the overall development process and building a trading platform that was uniquely their own.

At the heart of the new architecture is Adaptive’s Aeron Sequencer. The choice was based on a few non-negotiable, real-world requirements:

• Flexible, not prescriptive: The team needed a powerful toolkit, not a restrictive box. The firm noted that Aeron “gives you a collection of tools, libraries and components and you can wire them the way you want,” offering freedom to innovate.
• Deployment portability: A “day zero requirement” was the ability to deploy services on-prem or in the cloud without a painful migration project. This business agility was critical for long-term strategy.
• A globally ordered log: The sequencer architecture provides a highly available, globally ordered message log. This technical foundation delivers the total ordering needed for transparent and reliable record-keeping, facilitating audit trails and regulatory compliance. Crucially, it provides the bedrock for building highly resilient services through proven architectural patterns like state machine replication.

Aeron Sequencer: Focus on business functionality, not infrastructure complexity

One of the most important strategic decisions was to separate business logic from core infrastructure. The firm’s goal was to “shield application developers from all the complexity,” a principle that directly aligns with the Aeron Sequencer’s philosophy.

They created an internal “app container” concept, where a core platform team manages the underlying infrastructure. This empowered the application developers to focus entirely on their competitive advantage: building advanced algorithms, smart order routing (SOR), and the order management system (OMS). By eliminating the need to build commoditized infrastructure, the firm was able to accelerate their time-to-market, going live with the new sequencer-based trading platform in under a year.

The outcome: high-performance and resilience in production with Aeron Sequencer

The company’s design and architecture choices ensure a reliable, stable, and high-performance trading platform for modern digital asset trading.

• Predictable, low-latency performance: As an executing broker, the firm’s success depends on being “reliable, extremely stable, and having a predictive latency that our customers are expecting.” By eliminating the database from the “hot path,” the architecture delivers the microsecond latency demanded by modern capital markets.
• Engineered for 24/7 operations: Instead of engineering complex rolling upgrades for every service, they leveraged the architecture to implement Blue-Green deployments, ensuring seamless updates with near-zero downtime. The platform currently operates 23/7 and is on its final stretch to achieving true 24/7 trading.
• Rapid innovation: The platform’s design empowers application teams to rapidly develop and deploy new features by cleanly separating infrastructure from business logic.
• Operational resilience: The sequencer-based architecture, with its globally ordered log, provides a unified, predictable record of events. This eliminates the complexities of tracing errors across disparate systems, allowing the firm to pinpoint the root cause of an issue quickly. This dramatically reduces costly downtime and ensures a rapid return to the market.

A digital asset trading platform for the future

The project proves that a bespoke, scalable and resilient trading platform can be built in months, not years, using a buy-to-build approach.

The strategic decisions of the digital asset firm left its internal teams free to focus on the business strategy and differentiation that drives their success and they now have a platform that won’t just meet the demands of today, but is ready to scale for the ambitions of tomorrow.