In a series of tweets, FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) announced that the company would update the trading platform’s matching engine in November. The new V2 release of the trading platform is expected to double the order throughput and half the order of latency. FTX developers have been working on the release for over a year. The tweets state an expected release of November 21, 2022, ahead of the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday.
FTX Evolved
The target of the improvements being released is the matching engine. As well as creating lower latency API pathways and a suite of other features.
Matching engines are used by crypto exchanges, much like other asset trading desks, to match buy and sell orders. This procedure allows users to trade cryptocurrencies with each other on centralized exchanges.
FTX’s matching engine has been complained about by users for a while now. These complaints are regarding the platform’s matching engine’s high latency and low throughput. Latency measures how fast the system can match the buy and sell orders. Thus higher latency means slower trade execution. This could cost users money if profitable trading positions are missed during the matching period.
FTX’s Recent Outage
This announcement comes less than a month after the FTX website crashed, preventing some users from accessing their funds. The event occurred after the release of the U.S. consumer price index (CPI) report in September. During the downtime, the price of Bitcoin dropped below $21,000 and Ether below $1,600 as the market reacted to the high CPI data.
Users with leveraged positions open on their FTX accounts could not make changes during this sharp move in crypto prices. It is estimated that $110 million of liquidations occurred throughout crypto derivatives exchanges when the FTX website was down.
Many upset FTX customers, including the popular crypto twitter trading account HsakaTrades, called out SBF for the outage. As such, some of the responses to SBF’s announcement of V2 included ensuring the platform website would remain stable during times of high market volatility.
It is yet to be seen how the updated matching engine will affect FTX’s trading platform during times of high market volatility. However, if the V2 release can meet its stated goals, it would likely be a positive development for FTX users.
FTX Continues To Grow
FTX is consistently ranked the third largest crypto exchange by volume and has been gaining on its competitor Coinbase for the number two spot. Both, however, trail Binance by a wide margin for the number one spot. The growth is owed to SBF’s strategic vision and a large core developer team that consistently ships updates on the platform.
According to the FTX website, over five million registered users are on the platform. Traders average around $12.5 billion daily trading volume, with a peak of $21 billion in 2021. The company is expected to return $1.1 billion in revenue and is among the most profitable fintech companies in 2022.
