v0.4.0-beta · exchange infrastructure to build on

The open-source core to launch an exchange.

Matching, accounting, and market data: the hardest parts of a trading venue, already built, already tested against failure, and open to read. You bring the product; the engine is done.

Live demo → trade.openexchange.dev
What is this

An exchange engine you can actually own

An exchange has one core job: match buyers with sellers instantly and fairly, without ever losing an order or letting a balance go wrong. Open Exchange is that core, built in the open.

A trader places an order. It's checked against risk rules, three independent servers agree on it, it's matched in a fraction of a millisecond, and everyone sees the same order book at the same moment. If a server dies mid-trade, another takes over in seconds and nothing is lost, and a test kills our cluster leader on every commit to prove it. That whole path is what you get, as source code you can read.

Who it's for

Built for the teams who need an engine, not a science project.

Exchanges

You’re launching a trading venue, or replacing an engine that has hit its ceiling. Start on a core that already matches, replicates, and recovers, and spend your year on markets and product instead of matching-engine plumbing.

Neobanks and fintechs

You want to add trading to a product people already use. The engine, order management, and market data come as ready infrastructure with a clear API, so your team integrates instead of inventing.

Engineers and quant teams

You want a fast core you can actually read, run, and extend. No black box, no per-trade licensing. Clone it, bring it up locally, and see exactly how it behaves under load, bugs and all.

Market makers and prop desks

You need a realistic matching venue of your own: for internal crossing, strategy testing, or simulation against a book that behaves like the real thing, with exact fills and honest latency numbers.

Scope

What we provide vs. what you own

Open Exchange is the infrastructure you build an exchange on. You bring identity, custody, fiat, and compliance; integrate those before you touch real funds.

Open Exchange provides

The infrastructure layer.

  • Matching engine & array-backed order book
  • Raft-consensus clustering & failover
  • OMS pre-trade risk pipeline (7 checks)
  • Deterministic money ledger on its own Raft cluster (Assets Engine)
  • Real-time market data (WebSocket)
  • Admin / ops gateway & runbooks
  • Reference trading UI
  • Configurable markets (demo ships BTC/ETH/SOL/XRP/DOGE-USD)

You (the integrator) own

Your product & regulatory responsibility.

  • KYC / AML & sanctions compliance
  • Custody & wallets (hot/cold, key management)
  • Fiat on/off ramps & bank/PSP integration
  • User identity, login & account opening (IAM)
  • Regulatory licensing & compliance
  • Real-money settlement (on/off-chain)
  • Market surveillance
  • Tax & regulatory reporting
Why it's fast

Numbers we measured, not numbers we hope for

Zero allocation on the matching path, an array-backed order book, and byte-bounded pipelines. Here is what that adds up to on our test rig.

800korders/sec

Sustained at 100.00% acceptance; the test rig ran out before the cluster did

Handles serious volume from day one, with room to grow into.

0.22µs p50

Median cluster admission latency, flat as load climbs (end-to-end adds egress batching)

Fast enough that the network, not the engine, sets your latency floor.

ZeroOOM

Egress is byte-bounded; it sheds and reconciles under overload

Doesn’t fall over under load; it stays within a fixed memory budget and recovers on its own.

8decimals

Fixed-point money math, exact at every step, overflow rejected up front

Money is counted exactly, with no rounding drift and no floating-point cents.

Measured on a single Intel 13700K running a 3-node Aeron Raft cluster with external media drivers, pinned cores, and OS tuning, in local development.

A closer look

Watch an order become a trade

Risk checks, a money hold on the Assets Engine, three-server Raft matching, and market data served once to the edge. The list narrates each step as it happens; pick a scenario to watch a rolling update or a failover.

order flowmoneymarket datacontrol planeleaderroadmap
INGRESSEGRESSSECURE ZONEprivate networknode 0node 1node 2MATCH ENGINEnode 0node 1node 2ASSETS ENGINEUIAPIOMSRAW SBEMARKET GWEDGEVIEWERSFIX GWB2B / HFTADMIN GW
Order in: client submits over REST / gRPC
Our services

The core is free. The people who built it are for hire.

Everything on this page runs without paying us anything. When you want it deployed, tuned, extended, or supported by the team that wrote it, that's what we do.

Architecture consulting

We help you decide how Open Exchange fits your product, your latency budget, and your compliance setup before you commit.

Custom configuration

Markets, tick sizes, risk limits, auth modes, cluster layout: tuned to your case instead of the defaults.

Deployment and setup

From a fresh environment to a running, monitored stack, with backups and runbooks in place.

Performance tuning

OS tuning, driver profiles, and load testing on your hardware, with honest before-and-after numbers.

Security reviews

A hard look at your deployment: auth, network exposure, secrets handling, and the edges where exchanges usually get hurt.

Legacy migration

Planned, rehearsed migrations off an existing engine, with balances reconciled to the unit before you cut over.

Support and SLAs

Ongoing help from the people who wrote the code, under support agreements with response times we'll commit to in writing.

Team training

Your engineers learn the architecture, the operations playbook, and the sharp edges directly from us.

Custom feature work

New order types, connectors, or integrations built into the stack properly, not bolted on.

Momentum

Where things stand

We push the system past its limits and publish what we find, corrections included. Every release ships with honest notes.

v0.4.0-beta: the money release
  • Money moved to the Assets Engine: a deterministic ledger on its own Raft cluster, the fifth repo in the stack.
  • Every money movement is replayable: a settlement journal keyed by OMS order ids, plus a per-node money journal with a Postgres projector.
  • Egress is totally ordered: every trade and status message carries its replicated-log position, so downstream state can never reorder.
  • Market data is served from the edge: the cluster publishes once, Cloudflare fans out to every viewer.
  • Three HIGH CVEs (netty, jackson-core, gRPC-Go) closed before the tag, not after it.
What's next
  • An external security review before anything touches real funds.
  • Standard market-access connectors (FIX and richer gRPC).
  • Managed deployments and compliance building blocks as paid layers on top of the free core.
About the team

A small team that publishes its mistakes

We build in public: the benchmarks, the trade-offs, the OOM crash, and the 30x measurement error we caught and corrected. If you're going to trust an engine with money, you should be able to read how it was built.

Apache 2.0 · Building in public

Read the code and run it yourself.

Open Exchange

The open-source core to launch your own exchange. Fast, fault-tolerant, built in public.

v0.4.0-beta

Apache 2.0 · Beta software: the public API is frozen, but it has not had an external security audit yet and should not hold production money until it does. Open Exchange is the infrastructure you build an exchange on; KYC/AML, custody, fiat, identity, and compliance are the integrator’s responsibility.