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 visitwww.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!
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!
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:
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!
We would like to start a cycle of short articles that will highlight the main XTRD advantages and explain why you might consider using our services and ecosystem to build your next big thing.
Market data is fuel for the financial industry. No matter what you are doing – watch a chart, trade through some platform, or run automated strategies – the data is what makes the wheels spin.
Despite its’ inherent openness, crypto market data is not an easy nut to crack. If your needs are a bit more than ETH/BTC from Binance, then you enter a territory of different protocols, unreliable transfer channels, out of the blue API changes, and proprietary, very unique symbology standards. A “build to last” approach does not work here; much of your resources will be immediately consumed by dozens of small tasks related to market data channels. Of course, if data distribution is the core of your business, it makes perfect sense to build and maintain these connections in-house. But if not?
For the last two years XTRD successfully provided reliable market data from major digital assets exchanges from the US, Asia, and Europe. Coinbase Pro, Gemini, Binance US, OKCoin, Binance, Huobi, OKEx, Bitmart, HitBTC, Bittrex, Bitstamp – this is just to name a few.
The biggest advantage is that data is coming in a normalized format using FIX 4.4 protocol. Instead of streaming huge entire order book updates, our servers optimize the flow by sending only actual changes (in a form of “MarketDataIncrementalUpdate” messages). We send you the updates only, not the entire order book over and over, which is how it comes through natively for many exchanges.
For financial professionals with relevant experience, integration with XTRD’s market data streaming services is a question of days (sometimes hours) rather than weeks and months when dealing with native exchange formats.
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 streaming digital asset market data. 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 free, no-obligation trial period.
Bookmap is a very convenient platform to track market trends through advanced visualization capabilities. Combined with XTRD-provided set of digital assets exchange access, powers a valuable tool to navigate these markets.
Here is a brief instruction on how to get started using XTRD data services inside Bookmap.
We assume that you already have the latest and greatest version of Bookmap downloaded and installed! If not, you always can do it from https://bookmap.com.
The XTRD Market Data Addon is available on the Bookmap Marketplace – a pretty self-explanatory service where you can find many valuable extensions.
The XTRD Storefront contains many different items that can be grouped into two categories:
Addons
Subscriptions
The XTRD Market Data Addon is a free-to-download component that does all the heavy work – connect, receive, and parse market data streams from multiple digital asset exchanges.
Subscriptions are the ability to receive and visualize information for a particular exchange e.g. Binance, Huobi, CEX.IO, or BitMex using Bookmap.
First, you’ll need to install the XTRD Market Data Addon for Bookmap.
In order to install XTRD Market Data Add-on:
1. Open Bookmap
2. Go to Settings → Manage plugins
3. Click the Install button located near xtrd-adapter.
4. Restart Bookmap.
All set! XTRD Market Data Add-on is installed now, but to start working with it you need to get credentials from us (login, password). In order to do this go to https://marketplace.bookmap.com and subscribe to XTRD Market Data Add-on.
After you subscribed, you will receive an email with the credentials from us.
Then you need to set up the connection for XTRD Market Data Add-on. In order to do this:
1. Open Bookmap.
2. Go to Connections → Configure → ADD CONNECTION
3. Select XTRD Market Data Addon and enter your credentials.
XTRD Market Data Add-on is ready for work now and should appear in the list of connections in the Connections section. You can now launch XTRD Market Data Add-on by simply selecting it from this list.
To start getting market data from XTRD you need to buy a subscription to one of the exchanges. In order to do this:
2. Filter the list by XTRD (if you buy a subscription that is not associated with XTRD it won’t work on XTRD Market Data Add-on).
3. Select one of the exchanges.
4. Buy a subscription.
5. Get an email from us confirming that you have bought the subscription.
After that restart XTRD Market Data Add-on if it is on. Go to the Connection section and turn off XTRD Market Data Add-on by left click and then turn on again the same way. If it is off, you just need to launch it.
You can now select the exchanges you subscribed to and get market data for the selected symbols. In order to select symbols click “+” on the top right corner of the Bookmap window or press Ctrl+T and select symbols in the pop-up window.
Original post by XTRD Co-Founder and CTO Serg Gulko
Huobi Global is a Singapore based cryptocurrency exchange founded in 2013. With daily volumes of around $2 billion per day, Huobi Global is an extremely liquid exchange for multiple crypto trading pairs including BTC, ETH, LTC, XRP, and more. As of January 2020, it has around 400 verified markets and about 25 unverified markets. It’s worth mentioning that Huobi Global, unlike many other exchanges, has never been hacked and has millions of customers all over the globe.
In this article, we would like to demonstrate how to build a relatively simple but fully functional trading application on top of XTRD FIX API that would connect to Huobi. You can freely re-use this as source code in your own projects.
The application will show how to establish two outgoing FIX connections to the XTRD FIX Gateway. One of the sessions will be used to receive real-time, normalized market data for a single pair — ETH/USDT. The second session will provide access to trading capabilities alongside certain account’s financial information such as open orders and positions.
So, as the first step, we will connect to the market data session and will subscribe to updates for ETH/USDT.
Simultaneously, the application will establish a connection to a trading session and will perform full cycle recovery operations — get a list of open orders and get available balances.
After we finish the handshake phase, the application will start sending limit orders to buy ETH. The order price will be always 20% outside the market just to make sure that the order will rest in the book and not execute. We will allow the order to rest on the book for several seconds and then cancel it. Then the cycle will start over. Eat. Sleep. Repeat.
Huobi has an advanced and rich API. But, like any big and complex thing, it has its own disadvantages. For example, you can’t send orders using WebSocket and have to use REST API. So what’s the issue? Many digital assets exchanges do the same.
The problem is the confirmation that comes over WebSocket doesn’t contain the client’s assigned ID and only has a Huobi-generated Order ID. However, you can know this external Order ID only after you’ll receive and parse the response on your REST API request. Sometimes, WebSocket’s message is delivered faster than you receive your Order ID which leaves you guessing what this report is all about.
Someone always runs (or rides) faster…
The XTRD Orders router successfully solves this problem so our clients can enjoy streamlined ExecutionReport orders in a proper way.
Taking into account that this application will not be that simple, we will use several supportive classes, developed by our team. We do not recommend using these classes in high-load applications because of a lack of optimization but it’s good enough for the purpose of this course.
To build a simple trading application, we will use Java and OnixS FIX Engine. Of course, you can always replace Java with C++, Python, or JavaScript and OnixS with QuickFIX or Fix8, that’s the beauty of the FIX API — it’s completely language and engine agnostic. Yes, we do prefer to use OnixS libraries because of their advantages but this is only an internal team decision.
Feel free to contact us if you need assistance with porting to another language/FIX library, we are happy to help!
The application we will build is a state machine that moves from one stage to another depending on previous conditions. Here is the diagram with possible(simplified to increase readability) states:
As you can see, the application will start sending orders only if it is in the APP_ENTER_MARKET stage which is a combination of MD_READY and ORD_READY. If something unexpected happened, e.g. one of the sessions lost a connection, all trading activities will be stopped.
Let’s get started with the easiest part — establishing a connection to a market data session and subscribing to updates for ETH/USDT.
The XTRD MD Feeder expects that you will start your handshake by sending a special message called Logon that contains fields Username and Password.
You might ask a reasonable question — is it secure to send unencrypted credentials? Well, XTRD clients are connected to our server using one of these options:
IPSec VPN channel
Cross-connection
Co-locating within Equinix NY4 data center
Therefore, all traffic between you and us is completely isolated from other people. And, as we already know your password, there is no sense to hide it from us:)
In the case of successful authorization, our server will respond with a Logon message which moves us to the stage of sending a message to subscribe to the market data stream.
In FIX we use MarketDataRequest to indicate updates for what instrument(s) and exchanges we would like to receive.
In order to act as a true normalization layer, we decided to maintain our own symbology. So, instead of trading ethusdt(on Huobi), usdteth(on Bittrex), or 4(on BlockTrade) the only one name you have to use is ETH/USDT.
Here is a sample of MarketDataRequest structure and part of Java code to create a corresponding message:
MarketDataRequest
Once received by server, MarketDataRequest message will trigger a chain of events:
Server will send real-time incremental updates for the required instrument when the corresponding symbol will be changed on the Huobi end. Instead of sending a full book (which sometimes could be really big) XTRD takes an approach to optimize data flow by sending only the parts that actually have been changed — e.g. trades, new price levels added or removed, size updates.
Our book management rules are based on widely used principles from traditional finance — a combination of NEW(0), UPDATE(1), and DELETE(2) events. This is a very straightforward approach that helps to easily build reliable and predictable software.
To illustrate this concept, we built and share on our repository a very simple book. We do not recommend using this code in a production environment because it suffers from significant performance penalties. But it’s still good enough for the purpose of this article.
So we will “feed” all market data events into our simple book. This way we can be sure that we have an accurate picture of what is going on in a market (with one particular instrument).
Perfect, we have the data! But what will we do with it? Let’s dive into building a trading connector!
This part is much more complicated compared with market data because it requires position and order synchronization. In order to keep this article in a reasonable size, we will omit actual synchronization and recovery techniques and will only show how to send messages. Anyway, each trading application has its’ own backend and own rules…
The first step is completely the same as the market data session — Logon. Once we pass authorization, it’s time to request a list of our assets under management. FIX has a special message for this — RequestForPositions. Depending on the usage context, the server will return a current position snapshot and/or will continue to notify you in real-time if position size changes in case of trade, withdrawal or deposit.
The workflow is following — you sent a RequestForPositions message and the server will get back to you with one RequestForPositionAck message that indicates what to expect next. In case you do have some positions, the information will arrive in the form of PositionReport messages.
RequestForPositions
The very last PositionReport message will have a special marker that we will use to switch to another stage — order synchronization.
Sometimes your trading session might have live working orders sitting somewhere in books. The XTRD FIX API has a special message to call for these working horses — OrderMassStatusRequest. In the FIX world, most of the information about orders is transmitted using ExecutionReport message. This message contains the most number of fields in comparison with other messages from FIX language. But it helps to precisely identify orders and their respective statuses.
As long as XTRD acts as a DMA provider, we want to make sure that all our operations are 100% transparent. So alongside the client’s assigned ID (transmitted in field ClOrdID(Tag 11)) and XTRD assigned ID (OrderID(Tag 37), always integer number), you will see an exchange-assigned ID (in SecondaryOrderID(Tag 198) field).
Our order synchronization strategy works like this — send OderMassStatusRequest and wait for server response. There are two possible scenarios(in case of a valid initial message):
Server will respond with a list of ExecutionReports which can be filtered by MdReqId(request ID, assigned by client) and ExecType=STATUS(I)
In the case when you don’t have open orders, the server will respond with specially formatted ExecutionReport. We did it this way because unlike counterparty to Request for Positions — RequestForPositionsAck, FIX does not have a default confirmation message for order status which might mean you’ll wait for your reports forever.
At this point, our positions and orders are synchronized so let’s have some fun shooting orders!
Our application will take the top of the book price and then will send a Limit order with price X pips aways from the best bid or offer (depending on a side we choose). Our goal is to create an order which will rest in the book for a certain amount of time before the algo cancels it.
To place an order, we will use a message called NewOrderSingle. Its’ fields are pretty straightforward and self-explanatory — you need to specify Side(Tag 54 ) (buy or sell), Type(Tag 40) (Limit in our case), provide a limit price and order size, set Symbol(Tag 55) and a routing destination(Tag 11) (HUOBI in this case). The full fields description for NewOrderSingle message can be found here.
NewOrderSingle
Once an order is sent out, the server will respond with a certain number of ExecutionReports indicating life cycle changes. The XTRD platform uses the following statuses to indicate what is going on with your order:
PENDING_NEW: order passed initial verification and is accepted by our platform for further execution
NEW(0): order has been delivered to the target exchange and accepted for execution
PARTIALLY FILLED(1)/FILLED(2): part of the order size or whole order has been matched with a counterparty and executed
CANCELED(4): order has been canceled manually or through API request
REJECTED(8): order has been rejected because of an internal error or wrong parameters
Of course, we all want to see a perfect PENDING_NEW/NEW -> FILLED cycle and our engineers are doing their best in order to provide the fastest tech. We also rely on our LP partners such as Huobi Global.
Perfect, your order is in a book so let’s hurry to cancel it before it gets executed!
To cancel an order, you need to send an OrderCancelRequest message. Here is the tricky part — you need to provide 3 IDs:
ClOrdID: ID for your cancel request
OrigClOrdID: this is an internal ID of your trading order sent on a previous step
OrderID: ID on XTRD side
Translated in human language, this record should be read as follows: “use Order ClOrdID to cancel my previously placed order OrigClOrdID/OrderID”
OrderCancelRequest
Once we cancel your order, the server will notify you with corresponding ExecutionReport, confirming that trading/working order has been canceled.
In accordance with the workflow of a demo application, the algo will sleep for 2 seconds and then will send another Limit order. Again. And again.
As you can see, it’s relatively easy to build a simple trading application for Huobi using the XTRD FIX API. When properly designed, it will work clockwise, without stops for sleep or rest. Of course, you need to integrate some logic to enter and exit markets but there are many signal providers, case studies, technical analysis libraries, and even AI platforms that could be utilized.
No matter what you will use as the “brain” for your actual application, rest assured that the XTRD FIX API for trading on cryptocurrency exchanges such as Huobi will remain a trustworthy and reliable partner!
For XTRD, the Trading Show has become a must-attend event. Our team usually attends Chicago and New York venues, completely ignoring other destinations. This year we decided to change our approach and try London!
Long story short — it was more than successful! The exhibition took place only for one day on October 17th but at the moment of writing this small update (November 1) we are still conducting followup calls with contacts obtained during the show.
Unlike the US, the floor in this particular show was almost immediately crowded (famous British punctuality?). We came to the show as a team of three people and this was really a smart move. Numerous conversations regarding differing topics — trading, banking, exchange technologies, future of digital assets, regulation and so on. Tough but interesting questions to answer!
Speaking of XTRD services — people mainly were interested in market data and order routing — how many exchanges are covered, what is our latency, how secure our facility etc. It worth to mention several companies that stopped by our booth — BookMap, TradingView, Vauban, PICO, OKEx, Binance, Edelweiss Financial Services, ITS Trading, LGO Markets, Quazard Gaming, Sprinkle Group. We are working hard to see them as partners or clients one day!
Fun fact — absolutely unexpectedly I found myself as a speaker for 1 PM slot:) Luckily, I had with me my old version of “The Cold, Hard Truth about Crypto Adoption” which I reused once again. Can’t say it was super successful or at least caused continues discussion (like it happened in New York) but I learned this lesson — no more philosophy on stage:)
The XTRD team will take part in AI & Emerging Tech for Finance conference that will be held by Corinium on November 12–13 2019, in Convene at 101 Greenwich, New York City.
The theme of the conference is “Embracing the Machines: The Future of Emerging Technologies for Finance”. Main topics are:
The Impact of Blockchain on the Finance Industry
Evaluating Emerging Tech: What’s Worthwhile/ What’s a Fad?
Building Bridges Between Traditional Investment Strategies & ML
The Latest Applications for Deep Learning & AI in Finance
Challenges Presented by Data Governance
Acquiring & Using Alternative Data
Participating in this event will allow the XTRD team to meet senior leaders and decision-makers from industry leading organizations, and broaden our professional networking in general.
Corinium is the world’s largest community designed to inspire and support the emerging C-Suite executives focused on Data, Analytics, Customer and Digital Innovation. They produce industry leading conferences like Chief Data & Analytics Officer Fall, Chief Data & Analytics Officer Spring, Chief Data & Analytics Officer Finance and others.
