Adaptive Financial Consulting (Adaptive) has announced a multi-year partnership with Bullish, a rapidly growing regulated digital asset exchange, to enhance trading capacity and throughput. The collaboration aims to support Bullish’s scalability in response to rising business demand.
As part of the agreement, Bullish will replace its current messaging technology with Adaptive’s Aeron Premium and receive associated support and professional services. Aeron Premium, an enterprise-grade product, enhances Adaptive’s open-source Aeron technology with additional software components designed to improve performance, security, and resilience in cloud environments. As a cloud-native exchange, built on Google Cloud’s infrastructure, Bullish has integrated Aeron Premium services directly through the Google Cloud Marketplace.
“We’ve dedicated significant time to optimising Aeron specifically for Google’s infrastructure (and also for AWS), ensuring that the DPDK driver—the kernel bypass driver used in Aeron—is fully adapted to Google’s environment,” says Adaptive CEO Matt Barrett, in conversation with TradingTech Insight. “This means that partners like Bullish don’t need to worry about these technical details. When they license Aeron, they benefit from the assurance that we’ve had early access to Google’s hardware, allowing us to fine-tune Aeron for the new instance types that Google is releasing for capital markets firms. By the time these instances become generally available, all issues have been resolved, and we’ve perfected performance testing and tuning. This is incredibly valuable; no exchange wants the burden of developing its own DPDK kernel bypass driver—that’s a complex and frustrating task.”
Since implementing Aeron Premium, Bullish has achieved improved throughput and capacity, allowing for a higher number of orders per second and reduced order entry round trip time. This has enhanced access to liquidity for its participants. The exchange has also benefited from increased availability and reliability, utilising Google Cloud’s infrastructure and Aeron’s resiliency model to achieve near-zero downtime, simplified maintenance, and more reliable failover processes. Furthermore, the adoption of Aeron Premium has strengthened Bullish’s security framework, with additional encryption measures ensuring the protection of network data and client order information.
“Bullish was already using Adaptive’s FIX engine and we also have strong ties with Google Cloud,” commented Alan Fraser, Head of Platform Infrastructure at Bullish. “The synergy between our companies provided a solid foundation for collaboration. This strategic partnership allows us to leverage Adaptive’s ongoing Aeron performance testing and optimisations on Google Cloud, aligning with Bullish’s cloud-native approach. Swapping out the messaging middleware within an active exchange is no mean feat. Leveraging Adaptive’s support services provided us with invaluable expertise and assurance, significantly mitigating the risk associated with upgrading to a more scalable architecture.”
Aaron Walters, Exchange and Ecosystem Strategy, Google Cloud, added: “Google Cloud’s collaboration with Adaptive and Bullish underscores how our technology is empowering digital exchanges to scale and innovate at speed. By building its cloud-native platform on Google Cloud, Bullish was able to rapidly integrate Adaptive’s solutions through Google Cloud Marketplace, accelerating its ability to meet the evolving demands of the digital asset market.”
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