Case Study
Crypto Exchange
A full-stack cryptocurrency exchange with order matching, wallet management, and real-time market views.
Overview
Architected a cryptocurrency exchange from matching engine to user-facing trading interface. The platform emphasizes correctness, auditability, and horizontal scalability for core trading paths.
Architecture
Order matching engine runs in-memory with write-ahead logging. API gateway handles authentication and rate limiting. Wallet service manages hot/cold storage with multi-signature policies.
Tech Stack
System Design
The matching engine maintains price-time priority queues per trading pair. Settlement events propagate through an event bus to wallet, notification, and analytics services. All financial mutations are journaled for replay.
Challenges
- 01Ensuring atomic order execution under concurrent trade requests
- 02Designing idempotent APIs for financial operations
- 03Balancing security hardening with low-latency trade execution
Implementation
REST and WebSocket APIs expose order placement, cancellation, and market subscriptions. Frontend renders live depth charts and trade history with optimistic UI patterns bounded by server confirmation.
Results
Processed thousands of concurrent orders in simulation with zero duplicate settlements and full transaction traceability.
Lessons Learned
- —Financial systems require idempotency keys at every mutation boundary
- —Separate hot paths (matching) from cold paths (reporting)
- —Security models should assume breach—layer defense in depth