For major established trading communication routes that have relied on fiber optic cable, such as New York to Chicago, London to Frankfurt, or local back office transmissions as from New York to secondary sites in New Jersey, Enyx, a field programmable gate array (FPGA) provider, has introduced nxLink Share Version 2.
This new version of nxLink sends the transmissions for these routes using microwave radio frequencies. On the popular established routes, nxLink Share Version 2 adds 900 nanoseconds, which is a latency far lower than the minimum of 5 microseconds otherwise required, according to Arnaud Derasse, founder and CEO of Enyx.
nxLink may be used to send trade orders, market data and price information. Orders may be transmitted using just signals, notes Derasse. “They send a very small amount of information that goes to the other side to place an order,” he says. “The bandwidth is very constrained so they only send very little information on nxLink. They may only send orders for very latency-sensitive strategies.”
Proprietary trading firms and proprietary trading desks of investment banks comprise a majority of nxLink users, according to Derasse. Firms that compete aggressively with each other are among nxLink users. “We aren’t involved in any trading activities, which reassures that we have no incentive to have traps or tricks in the product. That’s one of the reasons why they use us,” says Derasse.
Aside from London and New York based routes, nxLink currently connects Chicago and Toronto, Chicago and Tokyo, Frankfurt and Zurich, Frankfurt and Milan, and Tokyo and Hong Kong. The London Stock Exchange Group uses Enyx’s nxLink.
nxLink Share Version 2 is delivered to users on a Metamako MetaApp32 hardware platform. nxLink can share one or more radio frequency links between multiple users, with bandwidth limitations. Enyx’s FPGA processing minimises the latency on the shared bandwidth when using radio frequency telecom links. nxLink Share Version 2 also includes monitoring tools needed by telecom service operators for financial services.
The previous version of nxLink Share launched in 2013 and has been used by most radio frequency telecom service providers for financial services globally.
Subscribe to our newsletter
