Blog
Engineering notes from the build: the numbers and the trade-offs behind the decisions.
We run a real crypto exchange for $148/month
The full stack, six Raft nodes plus services, runs on one 4-vCPU box: about 7,500 order submissions per second end-to-end at p50 2.2ms, over a matching core that clears 150k/sec. What $148/month handles, why it is cheap to build on, and how to run your own.
Read postOpen Exchange v0.4.0-beta: the money release
Money moves to its own Raft cluster: the Assets Engine joins as the fifth repo, every money movement lands in a replayable journal, egress becomes totally ordered, and three HIGH CVEs get closed on release day.
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The live demo is now a market: simulated traders, real order books, open 24/7
Sign up at trade.openexchange.dev and trade five crypto markets against a realistic simulated crowd: funded demo balances, price action anchored to real markets, and a rebuilt trading screen. Plus everything else that shipped in the week after beta.
Read postOpen Exchange v0.3.0-beta: the release where we tried to break it
The stack reaches beta: a failover test that kills the leader on every commit, exact money math end to end, a frozen v1 API, secure defaults, and an honest 800k orders/sec baseline.
Read postThe parts of building an exchange nobody warns you about
What’s actually hard about building an exchange: the durability, precision, and overload problems that sink teams, and the case for not building the core yourself.
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Rebuilding the order book: array-backed, 281,000 orders/sec, and the OOM bug on the way
How we replaced the matching engine’s order book, what the load tests actually showed, and the out-of-memory bug we found pushing for its limits.
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