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How to Build an Exchange (2017)

janestreet.com

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Re: How to Build an Exchange (2017)

#2
The context here is that Sam Bankman-Fried of FTX and a number of the other executives (Caroline Ellison and Brett Harrison) were previously traders at Jane Street. This video is from 2017, a couple of years prior to the FTX launch. It makes you wander if any of them were in attendance.

Re: How to Build an Exchange (2017)

#3

The context here is that Sam Bankman-Fried of FTX and a number of the other executives (Caroline Ellison and Brett Harrison) were previously traders at Jane Street. This video is from 2017, a couple of years prior to the FTX launch. It makes you wander if any of them were in attendance.

FTX didn’t make any of the architectural decisions presented in this talk.

Re: How to Build an Exchange (2017)

#4

The context here is that Sam Bankman-Fried of FTX and a number of the other executives (Caroline Ellison and Brett Harrison) were previously traders at Jane Street. This video is from 2017, a couple of years prior to the FTX launch. It makes you wander if any of them were in attendance.

[deleted]

Re: How to Build an Exchange (2017)

#5

The context here is that Sam Bankman-Fried of FTX and a number of the other executives (Caroline Ellison and Brett Harrison) were previously traders at Jane Street. This video is from 2017, a couple of years prior to the FTX launch. It makes you wander if any of them were in attendance.

While I wouldn't be surprised to see some proactive PR from the company in the wake of recent events, perhaps including the post on the zkSNARK competition last month; which was in my humble opinion one of the few submissions that has truly moved me since the late 2000's on this site:

I feel obliged to attest that the people I knew working at Jane Street at that time were some of the straightest shooters one could know. My anecdote is that SBF's toxicity didn't originate in their culture. Perhaps it was a counteraction to it, if anything.

Re: How to Build an Exchange (2017)

#8

The context here is that Sam Bankman-Fried of FTX and a number of the other executives (Caroline Ellison and Brett Harrison) were previously traders at Jane Street. This video is from 2017, a couple of years prior to the FTX launch. It makes you wander if any of them were in attendance.

FTX didn’t make any of the architectural decisions presented in this talk.

Yeah, as an exchange FTX was pretty terrible. The matching engine was notorious for being high latency, unreliable, and having all sorts of undocumented issues. Every algo trader there will tell you horror stories about trying to cancel an open order, getting a cancel confirmation, then getting notified that the order was executed. Sometimes seconds later.

What really gave FTX a competitive advantage was its cross-margining system. It was super easy to post collateral in any supported asset, and all open positions were automatically margined against each other. So if you were doing something like pairs trades between spot and futures, you didn't need to constantly monitor and manually move capital between the silos. In hindsight though it's not clear if this was possible because of better engineering, or just because Alameda was internalizing all the risk.

Re: How to Build an Exchange (2017)

#9
post #7

Fun fact: Jane Street, Citadel and other HFT firms pay exorbitantly. You can see the base salary ($200-300k) posted public here: https://www.janestreet.com/join-jane-street/position/4274288... Even interns make $120/hr: https://www.levels.fyi/internships/

Have family working there. You can get past 300K fairly easily once you factor in signing bonus, annual bonus, and "extras".

They pay VERY VERY well indeed.

Re: How to Build an Exchange (2017)

#10
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FTX didn’t make any of the architectural decisions presented in this talk.

Yeah, as an exchange FTX was pretty terrible. The matching engine was notorious for being high latency, unreliable, and having all sorts of undocumented issues. Every algo trader there will tell you horror stories about trying to cancel an open order, getting a cancel confirmation, then getting notified that the order was executed. Sometimes seconds later. What really gave FTX a competitive advantage was its cross-ma…

The main advantage of FTX's exchange was that it was far better than Binance's but that's barely saying anything.

I'm not sure why crypto exchanges have such lousy technology. Lost acks, weird parser errors, missing order id fields, sessions giving no indication that the matching engine is down, etc.

It seems like any conceivable way an exchange can break will be encountered after only a couple months of trading. It's a complete shit show compared to traditional exchanges

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