In 2013, I designed and built a cryptocurrency exchange for the China market. The basic concept & architecture only took a few days, but the full implementation required several years. I shared the basic architecture in 2013, and with the recent spike in interest in Bitcoin and Ethereum, I thought I would share additional details on the concept.
I wrote the trading engine for the exchange over a long weekend in Shanghai. It turns out that building a large-scale cryptocurrency exchange is quite complex, and it finally (and successfully) launched in 2016. The notes below describe my design vision from 2013 – the implementation followed this specification fairly closely. There is a lot of detail and documentation to many of the sections below – some of which I will elaborate in future posts. If you want more detail on something specific, comment below or find me on LinkedIn.