| Sector | Cryptocurrency & Digital Asset Trading |
| Firm type | Proprietary crypto trading firm, Singapore-headquartered |
| Situation | Transition from consumer-grade cloud to institutional HFT infrastructure |
| Core problem | Consumer infrastructure unable to support multi-venue APAC scaling |
| Services delivered | Institutional HFT Infrastructure, Low Latency Trading Servers, Multi-Venue Connectivity, Co-location, Compliance Architecture |
| Result | Sub-5ms execution across five APAC venues, institutional onboarding unblocked |
Background
The client had built a genuinely sophisticated algorithmic crypto trading operation. Over three years, their quant team had developed strategies capable of identifying and acting on pricing inefficiencies across multiple APAC digital asset venues simultaneously in theory. In practice, the infrastructure they were running on had never been built for what they were asking it to do.
The firm had started, as many crypto trading operations do, on consumer-grade cloud infrastructure. In the early stages, when they were operating on a single venue with relatively modest order flow, this worked well enough. But by 2023, the firm was attempting to run automated trading strategies across five APAC venues concurrently, and the gap between what their strategies required and what their infrastructure could deliver had become the single biggest constraint on the business.
They were not losing because their strategies were wrong. They were losing because by the time their orders reached the market, the opportunity had already gone. Their institutional competitors, operating on purpose-built low latency trading infrastructure with direct co-location were simply faster. Not marginally faster. Categorically faster.
The firm’s founders had begun conversations with institutional prime brokers about expanding into regulated digital asset venues across APAC. Those conversations had stalled at the infrastructure question. The prime brokers needed to see compliance documentation, uptime SLAs, and an infrastructure architecture that met institutional standards. What the firm had could not produce any of those things.
They were referred to us by a legal advisor working on their regulatory expansion. The brief was clear: build us the infrastructure that closes the gap with our institutional competitors and gets us into the rooms we need to be in.
The Challenge
The firm came to us with a thorough self-assessment of their situation. Their quant team had been logging execution data across all five venues for six months and had built a detailed picture of where and how their consumer-grade cloud setup was failing them. The findings shaped the entire infrastructure brief.
| Challenge | Trading Impact |
| Consumer-grade cloud servers handling execution across five APAC crypto venues simultaneously | Latency inconsistency between venues creating arbitrage blind spots and missed cross-market fills |
| No co-location presence, all execution routed through public internet | Round-trip latency of 80–120ms to regional venues; institutional competitors operating at sub-5ms |
| Single-region infrastructure with no geographic redundancy | Any Singapore data centre event risked full trading desk outage across all venues simultaneously |
| Manual provisioning unable to respond to crypto market volatility spikes | Algorithms throttled or halted during the highest-opportunity market conditions |
| Institutional counterparties and prime brokers requiring infrastructure compliance documentation | Expansion to regulated venues blocked pending infrastructure credibility audit |
The compliance dimension added a layer of urgency that pure performance concerns alone would not have. The prime broker conversations were not going to wait indefinitely. The firm needed infrastructure that could be documented, audited, and presented to institutional counterparties, and they needed it within a defined window.
The Solution
We approached this engagement as two parallel workstreams: performance and compliance. Both needed to be solved simultaneously, an infrastructure that was fast but undocumented would not unblock the institutional relationships, and one that was compliant but slow would not close the competitive gap. The solution had to deliver on both dimensions at once.
| Phase | What We Delivered |
| Infrastructure Audit | Mapped the firm’s full execution path across all five APAC venues, latency, hops, routing, and hardware to establish a clear baseline and identify the highest-impact intervention points |
| Co-location Deployment | Provisioned institutional-grade co-location within Singapore’s Tier III financial data centre, with direct low-latency cross-connects to the firm’s primary crypto and digital asset trading venues across APAC |
| Low Latency Server Build | Deployed purpose-built high frequency trading servers configured for crypto market microstructure, kernel bypass networking, hardware timestamping, and NUMA-optimised memory allocation for simultaneous multi-venue order management |
| Network Fabric | Installed Arista ultra low latency switches across the full switching fabric, replacing the cloud-based routing that had been introducing variable and uncontrollable latency into every execution path |
| Multi-Venue Connectivity | Engineered dedicated low-latency network paths to each of the firm’s five target APAC trading venues, with independent failover per venue so that a single connectivity issue could not cascade across the full trading operation |
| Redundancy Architecture | Built a fully redundant infrastructure stack, dual switching, dual power, dual connectivity, eliminating the single points of failure that had made the firm’s prior setup unsuitable for institutional counterparty requirements |
| Compliance Documentation | Produced full infrastructure architecture documentation and uptime SLA reporting aligned to the requirements of the firm’s institutional prime brokers and prospective regulated venue partners |
| “We had the strategies. We had the talent. What we did not have was infrastructure that let any of it actually work at the speed crypto markets move. That changed completely once we were co-located and running on hardware built for this. The difference was not incremental — it was a different class of operation entirely.”
— Co-Founder & Head of Trading, Singapore Crypto Trading Firm |
Results
Within eight weeks of go-live on the new infrastructure, the performance data the firm’s quant team had been tracking for six months showed a step-change improvement across every metric that mattered:
- Execution latency reduced from an average of 80–120ms to sub-5ms across all five APAC venues, a 96% reduction driven by the combination of co-location, kernel bypass networking, and Arista switching
- Multi-venue order management, previously throttled by the cloud infrastructure’s inability to handle simultaneous execution, ran without restriction for the first time
- Zero throttling events recorded during the first full quarter of operation, including through two periods of extreme crypto market volatility that would previously have forced manual intervention
- Infrastructure uptime reached 99.95% in the first quarter, with full redundancy eliminating the outage risk that had previously made institutional counterparties unwilling to engage
- Institutional prime broker onboarding completed within six weeks of infrastructure go-live, with compliance documentation accepted without revision by two separate counterparties
- The firm successfully applied for and received connectivity to its first regulated digital asset venue in APAC, a milestone that had been blocked for over a year pending infrastructure credibility
The quant team’s own analysis attributed a measurable improvement in strategy P&L directly to the latency reduction, the same strategies running on the new infrastructure were capturing opportunities that had been systematically missed on the cloud setup.
Why it Worked
The crypto trading market is in a structural transition. The firms that built their operations on consumer-grade cloud infrastructure during the earlier, less competitive phase of the market are now facing institutional-grade competitors who have made the infrastructure investment. Speed is no longer a differentiator in crypto trading, it is table stakes. The firms that have not yet made the infrastructure transition are not competing on the same playing field.
What made this engagement work was treating the infrastructure build as a strategic move, not a technical upgrade. Every component decision, the co-location site selection, the switch specification, the server configuration, the connectivity architecture was evaluated against two criteria: does it close the latency gap with institutional competitors, and does it meet the documentation and compliance standards that institutional relationships require?
As an experienced HFT infrastructure provider and ultra low latency trading service provider operating across the APAC region, we had the venue relationships, co-location partnerships, and hardware expertise to execute both workstreams simultaneously. We did not build a fast infrastructure and then try to document it for compliance. We built a compliant, documented, institutional-grade low latency trading infrastructure from the ground up, and it happened to be fast because that is the only way we build.
The firm is now operating as an institutional participant in the APAC crypto trading market. Their strategies are running on the infrastructure they always needed. The gap is closed.
Services Delivered
- Full execution path audit across five APAC crypto trading venues
- Institutional co-location provisioning — Singapore Tier III financial data centre
- Purpose-built high frequency trading servers — kernel bypass, NUMA-optimised, crypto market microstructure configured
- Arista ultra low latency switches — cut-through forwarding, hardware timestamping
- AMD Solarflare X4 Series NICs for wire-speed kernel-bypass execution
- Dedicated low-latency cross-connects to five APAC digital asset trading venues
- Fully redundant switching, power, and connectivity architecture
- Infrastructure compliance documentation and uptime SLA reporting for institutional counterparties
- Ongoing managed infrastructure support for live multi-venue trading operations
