Quant Trading Consultancy (QTC)
Crypto derivatives

Rebuilding the Execution Layer for a Crypto Proprietary Trading Fund

A greenfield Rust platform, institutional-grade infrastructure and a bought-in middle and back office, delivered by a specialist QTC team

Evidence and delivery status

Engagement concluded at the controlled micro-trading stage, ahead of live capital deployment

Costa Victoros, founder of Quant Trading ConsultancyCosta Victoros

The challenge

A crypto derivatives fund was running a charting-platform-centric stack. Alert-driven signals added a multi-second delay at bar close, and synchronous database writes sat on the order path. Across a large number of trading engines, thread contention and cross-region routing issues left some orders unmanaged and made P&L unreliable. The fund could not move towards higher-frequency strategies or scale across venues.

What we did

QTC reviewed the code and infrastructure, then advised a greenfield rebuild of the execution hot path in preference to risky in-place refactoring. The new platform is event-driven and written in Rust.

  • Streams-centric design: database writes, logging and metrics moved off the critical path through asynchronous queues.
  • Direct market data: tick-by-tick streaming and FIX integration replaced delayed webhook signals.
  • Co-located infrastructure: dedicated bare-metal servers in institutional data centres, with market-data and order traffic separated at network level.
  • Layered risk controls: pre-trade, in-flight and exchange-side protections, with independent emergency shut-off capability.
  • Backtesting: an open-source framework for strategy research and a tick-level replay environment in the cloud.

Beyond the engine

A fast engine alone does not make a fund ready for live capital. We helped the client define the middle- and back-office framework around it: portfolio management, trade reconciliation, collateral and treasury, fund accounting and NAV, and compliance. The principle was to buy in specialist, independent systems and keep the execution engine in-house, with capital increases gated on those systems being in place and tested.

The team

All specialists were engaged through QTC and worked as one unit.

  • Quant / Development SME and Development Lead: strategy implementation, Rust engine design and delivery.
  • Senior Developer: order management, exchange connectors and code review.
  • DevOps and Network Engineer: server provisioning, co-location connectivity, network separation and deployment.

Where the engagement concluded

The platform ran continuously in paper trading against live market data on redundant servers, then progressed to controlled, micro-sized trading under a staged route to live capital, with risk parameters held under version control.

The engagement concluded at that stage, when the client’s funding plans changed and the capital-deployment phase did not go ahead. The design targets were low-latency internal processing, high-rate order-book handling and no synchronous database pauses on the trading path. QTC makes no claims about live trading performance, which was not established during the engagement.

Need to take a trading platform from prototype to production-ready? Talk to Quant Trading Consultancy.

Request the full case studyBook a diagnostic call

Client and counterparty details are withheld by agreement. Outcomes are described only where QTC can evidence them. Full case studies are available on request.