Adaptive has announced it is developing Aeron Sequencer, a software infrastructure platform designed to tackle some of the most persistent architectural challenges facing high-performance trading systems, including consistency, scalability, performance and availability.
Currently in late-stage development, Aeron Sequencer is positioned as an out-of-the-box application infrastructure layer for broker-dealers, exchanges and other market participants building large-scale, distributed trading platforms. Adaptive says the platform is intended to accelerate delivery timelines and reduce the operational and regulatory risks that can arise when firms attempt to engineer this foundational infrastructure themselves.Re-thinking core trading architectures for always-on markets
The announcement reflects a broader shift underway in capital markets technology, as firms reassess architectural assumptions that were shaped around batch-driven, market-hours-bound trading environments. As markets move towards continuous or near-continuous operation, traditional approaches based on loosely coupled microservices and eventual consistency are increasingly being tested by requirements for determinism, auditability and predictable performance.
“The emergence of event-based contracts and prediction markets has already forced many firms to rush out systems capable of supporting them,” observes Matt Barrett, CEO of Adaptive, in conversation with TradingTech Insight. “At the same time, 2026 is shaping up to be a year of large-scale tokenisation, dramatically expanding the universe of tradable instruments and placing unprecedented strain on systems designed for far smaller markets. Closely linked to this is the move towards true 24/7 trading. Together, these forces are accelerating markets and driving fundamental technological change – changes that, in our view, are poorly served by the dominant trading system architectures in use today, particularly when it comes to performance, resilience and consistency.
Sequenced architectures, which are built around a single, globally ordered stream of events, are emerging as an alternative approach. By enforcing total ordering at the infrastructure level, these architectures aim to simplify system design, reduce edge-case complexity and make it easier to reason about system state – an increasingly important consideration for both operational resilience and regulatory oversight.Adaptive’s Aeron Sequencer is explicitly built around this model. At its core is a replicated state machine architecture supported by a globally ordered, highly available message log. The company says this allows trading systems to process millions of messages per second at microsecond latency, while maintaining consistency and providing a durable audit trail.
Separating infrastructure from business logic
A central theme of the Aeron Sequencer proposition is the clean separation of foundational infrastructure from business functionality. According to Barrett, in many firms, highly skilled engineering teams spend a disproportionate amount of time building and maintaining infrastructure components that do not directly contribute to competitive differentiation.
“One common assumption is that there is an inherent trade-off between latency and throughput,” he says. “Aeron allows you to achieve very low latency and very high throughput simultaneously, whereas traditional messaging systems are often designed around choosing one or the other. We think that assumption needs to be revisited. It is entirely possible to run low-latency and high-throughput messaging through the same platform, rather than splitting them across different architectural components. Architectures are simpler and more robust when everything flows through a single, consistent pipeline.”
By providing a pre-built sequencing and coordination layer, Aeron Sequencer is intended to allow teams to focus on domain-specific services – such as pricing, risk, execution or market connectivity – while relying on the underlying platform to handle ordering, replication, failover and state management.
This approach aligns with a growing industry focus on developer productivity as a strategic concern. As systems grow in scale and complexity, the ability for teams to develop, test and release services independently, without compromising system-wide consistency, is becoming a key differentiator.
Designed for resilience, auditability and zero downtime
Aeron Sequencer is being designed to support both cloud-native and on-premises deployments, with flexible availability configurations including active/active and active/passive modes. The platform is also intended to support true 24×365 operation, with no downtime required for releases.
“Resilience doesn’t have to come at the expense of performance.,” argues Barrett. “A high-performance system that is not resilient is simply a risk waiting to materialise. With Aeron, automated failover and support for hot–hot or A/B services are built in. One of the most common gaps we see between in-house sequencer implementations and what we’ve built is that we treat resilience and high availability as first-class, non-negotiable properties.”
From a regulatory and control perspective, the emphasis on global ordering and persistent event logs is positioned as a way to simplify auditability and post-trade analysis. In an environment where regulatory scrutiny continues to intensify, particularly around market integrity and operational resilience, infrastructure that can provide a clear, deterministic record of system behaviour is becoming increasingly valuable.
Building on proven Aeron technology
While Aeron Sequencer represents a new platform initiative, it is built on Aeron, a high-performance messaging technology that is already widely deployed across capital markets. Adaptive says this existing adoption provides a degree of confidence for firms evaluating the platform, particularly in latency-sensitive and mission-critical environments.
Rather than introducing an entirely new messaging paradigm, Aeron Sequencer extends Aeron’s capabilities into a more complete infrastructure layer, aimed at standardising how sequenced architectures are implemented across trading systems.
“For those familiar with Aeron Cluster, the development model will feel very familiar,” says Barrett. “Business logic in Aeron Sequencer is written as single-threaded, deterministic code that is straightforward to understand and reason about. In fact, business logic can be moved between Aeron Cluster and Aeron Sequencer, and later this year we’ll be releasing an open-source abstraction that allows teams to build against a single API and move applications easily between the two. That deterministic model lends itself extremely well to outside-in automated testing. ”
Implications for trading technology strategies
Adaptive’s move highlights a broader industry trend towards standardising core front-office infrastructure, rather than treating it as a bespoke engineering exercise at every firm. As trading venues, broker-dealers and liquidity providers confront the realities of continuous markets, rising message volumes and stricter resilience expectations, architectural decisions are increasingly being treated as strategic choices rather than purely technical ones.
Aeron Sequencer positions sequenced architectures not as a niche pattern, but as a potential foundation for the next generation of institutional trading systems – particularly for firms looking to balance performance, resilience and regulatory demands without continually reinventing their core infrastructure.
“We expect the earliest and biggest impact to be in the broker-dealer space,” predicts Barrett. “Broker-dealers operate complex, low-latency electronic workflows that span multiple teams and departments. Aeron Sequencer provides a powerful way to coordinate across those domains while maintaining consistency, reliability and performance. Over time, we also expect adoption among tier-one exchanges that already operate sophisticated distributed architectures. Where Aeron Cluster helped commoditise high-performance, resilient architectures for smaller-scale systems, we believe Aeron Sequencer will do the same for much larger-scale environments.”
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