NEW YORK: 7/30/2020  – TradingScreen Inc. (TS) subsidiary MARKTS, a cryptocurrency order and execution management system (OEMS), announces today its partnership with XTRD, an orders routing and connectivity provider targeting digital markets, to enable end-users to connect to an additional set of crypto exchanges on the MARKTS platform. 

This integration will enable seamless connectivity to a further 20+ exchanges and expand the already extensive list of venues enabled on the MARKTS platform. The partnership will ensure reliable connectivity for institutional investors to digital assets by providing clients with alternative routes to liquidity and facilitating efficient trading of various top tier coins and tokens.

Through this partnership, MARKTS will address the long-standing issue of reliable connectivity to digital assets for the institutional sector and facilitate multi-venue access.

“In a market where liquidity is fractionated and reliable connectivity is essential, accessing multi-venues is paramount. Alongside our current set of TS connections, XTRD services will provide our clients with choice and key alternative routes to access liquidity.

“We are excited to partner with XTRD which complements our set of institutional-grade connections to various crypto venues,” says Alexandre Carteau, Head of MARKTS.

“We are happy to announce our partnership with MARKTS today to remove the barriers hindering reliable connectivity and access to digital assets for the institutional sector. Through this partnership we will provide institutional-grade solutions for traders of all kinds,” says Serg Gulko, Co-Found, and CTO at XTRD. 

About MARKTS:

MARKTS, a TradingScreen company, is a cloud-based ‘software-as-a-service’ platform that offers users the ability to employ institutional-grade tools to facilitate order routing of digital assets in one integrated and compliant solution. For more information, please visit www.markts.io

About XTRD: 

Founded in 2017 by financial markets trading experts, XTRD is introducing a new infrastructure to allow banks, hedge funds, and large institutional traders easy, reliable access to any cryptocurrency market they choose.  By building a low-latency infrastructure with a unified FIX API across multiple liquidity points, XTRD is taking an industry-standard technology used within global financial markets – namely FIX – for over 25 years and introducing it to the cryptocurrency market. Visit www.xtrd.io for more information.

When it comes to cybersecurity, especially in the digital asset industry, there is no room for compromises! 

Of course, this is a very hot topic and it’s always easy to talk about it rather than implement it in practice. These are additional procedures to follow, extra techniques to use, more people to hire. We built our systems taking into account the hostile environment where we will operate. Here is a brief overview of what XTRD does in order to protect our clients’ digital assets. 

Restricted access. Our servers are not available over the public internet. In order to trade, clients have to cross-connect with XTRD within Equinix IBX data centers. Another option is to set up a VPN tunnel. In both cases, we know who the customer is. 

Isolated environment for clients. Each client runs their operations within an isolated network segment invisible to other participants. This isolation is controlled by hardware and software layers. 

Components separation. XTRD is built as a modular system (different data buses, routing components, data normalization farm, streamers, databases, monitoring, journaling, and so on) where components are separated by firewalls (if required by business logic). Each component can access only very specific IP addresses and ports. And, of course, no access to the operating environment is available over the public Internet! 

Data encryption. Despite the fact that components are isolated and covered by firewalls, they “talk” to each other only through encrypted channels. Even internally. That’s the rule!

No sensitive information stored as a plain text. We deal with passwords, keys, and other forms of client’s credentials. This information is never stored unencrypted. API calls (yes, we do have REST API for accounts management) never return real data. Logs/journal records are scrambled to avoid unexpected leaks. 

Protected from people’s failure. XTRD uses techniques similar to launch sequences on nuclear submarines – in order to start the system, it required a combined effort of several people. So in case of an unlikely event when one part of the key was compromised, it’s still not enough to obtain access – analogous to a multi-signature wallet concept. 

Authentications and authorization. The majority of XTRD resources require authentication prior to obtaining access. In addition, access to certain resources is limited by a role-based authorization system. 

Journaling and monitoring. All events, big and small, are carefully monitored and added into a journal. We know who was doing what and when. Of course, this information is carefully stored and backed up via tape on separate geographically distant servers. 

XTRD has many more secure controls but we are keeping some of our secrets!  

Let us know if you would like to try our services with a no-cost, no-obligation trial period! 

Feel free to reach out to us on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, or via the website at XTRD.IO.

Previous articles:

Reliable Market Data
Normalized Symbology
Normalized API for Trading

XTRD’s mission is to provide clients with normalized FIX API to trade across multiple cryptocurrency exchanges. Our FIX 4.4-compatible solution can help you to:

• reduce development costs
• reduce maintenance costs 

All these “reduce” points are usually highly overused by marketers and in most cases become nothing but buzz words. Our team mainly consists of engineers, so instead we will speak in facts here.

Most digital asset exchanges have their own unique APIs. There is nothing wrong with expressing yourself by inventing yet another REST or WebSocket API for trading. Our team saw many of these along the way… The problem arises when you need to trade on, for example, Binance, OKEx, HitBTC, Gemini, and SeedCX simultaneously. The names were chosen intentionally because all five of these exchanges have significant differences in workflow. Try to send a market order through their native APIs and you’ll have a perfect example. 

Imagine that you need to build a system that should trade on these five exchanges – and for some reason, you decided to do it in-house. The integration of each exchange will take about three to four weeks (we’ve spent about two weeks per exchange, taking into account our 30+ integrated exchange experience). In an ideal scenario, this is one month for a team of five, or five months for a one-man-band. With prices ranging from $2,000 to $10,000 per engineer per month, you might end up with an initial budget of $10k to $50k. 

But this is only the initial commitment. Exchanges tend to change protocols by constantly introducing “latest and greatest” features, decommissioning old APIs, and doing all the other things that keep developers constantly busy. This means more work for engineers but less money for a business. 

We already passed this road and are happy to offer our FIX 4.4. order routing solution for crypto markets. XTRD’s solution provides the ability to trade digital assets using a single, standard API and very predictable workflow. All messages (NewOrderSingle, OrderCancelRequest, ExecutionReport, RequestForPosition, OrderMassStatusRequest and so on) and logic were replicated from traditional trading systems that make the integration process seamless and almost instantaneous. 

No matter how often exchanges change their protocols – the XTRD team tracks these changes on the back end to simultaneously update our own connectors and keep your trading operations uninterrupted. 

For financial professionals with relevant experience, integration with XTRD’s order routing services is a question of days (sometimes hours) rather than weeks and months when dealing with native exchange formats one by one. To those who are not familiar with FIX, we provide code samples and expert integration assistance. 

Being a member of the FIX Trading Community, XTRD does its best to spread the word regarding utilizing the FIX protocol for trading digital assets. We believe that a unified protocol such as FIX can significantly improve reliability and reduce the cost of ownership for our current and future clients. 

Let us know if you would like to try our services with a no-cost, no-obligation trial period! 

Feel free to reach out to us on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, or website. 

The XTRD team has built and maintained a database of normalized symbol names and assets in the digital asset trading space. This may sound like a small thing, but once you begin trading across multiple crypto exchanges things quickly start to become complicated. For example, just the ETH/USDT trading pair is represented as follows across these exchanges:

• ethusdt on HUOBI
• ETH/USDT on KRAKEN
• ETHUSDT on BINANCE
• 55 on BITMART

Here are additional esoteric naming conventions.

With XTRD, you can subscribe to market data updates through our FIX API using the same symbol name – for example, ETH/USDT – for Huobi, Kraken, Binance, Bitmart, and any other XTRD supported exchange. More importantly, you can trade over XTRD’s FIX using just the ETH/USDT symbol name for all exchanges. All trading messages, all reports – everything is built on top of normalized symbols and assets. XTRD has done the hard work of normalizing naming conventions, so you don’t have to. 

Today XTRD’s database contains 12,659 unique symbols with multiple permutations. This means that you can reach 30+ different digital asset exchanges in almost no time using XTRD’s unified FIX API. 

Being an active member of the FIX Trading Community, we understand the importance of standardization and are awaiting ISO’s decision regarding a global cryptocurrency naming convention. Whenever it will happen – today, tomorrow, or in two years – our systems are designed in a way that allows easy adaptation for diverse primary naming sources. 

Let us know if you would like to try our services with a free, no-obligation trial period! 

Feel free to reach out to us on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, or via the website at XTRD.IO.