quant.engineering

Inside DeFi's Hidden Economy: MEV, Mempools, and the Battle for Blockspace

rundef — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 00:00:00 -0500

Step inside DeFi's hidden economy: how mempools, MEV and Flashbots turn transaction ordering into a latency-driven execution game where speed and visibility decide outcomes long before settlement.

From Blocks to State: A Mental Model for Blockchain Systems

rundef — Sat, 07 Feb 2026 00:00:00 -0500

Blockchains are often explained through protocol-specific concepts like blocks or slots. This article reframes them as distributed state-transition systems, where ambiguity and delayed agreement exist to varying degrees across chains.

The Hidden DAG Behind Every Modern Trading System: How Market Data Is Ingested at Scale

rundef — Sat, 24 Jan 2026 00:00:00 -0500

Modern trading systems rely on directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) that branch, merge, and transform real-time feeds into many parallel consumers: matching engines, risk checks, analytics, surveillance, and storage. These ingestion DAGs exist to isolate failure, control fan-out, and preserve latency and correctness under extreme market conditions.

Flow Control in Low-Latency Systems: Batching, Conflation, and Backpressure

rundef — Sat, 10 Jan 2026 00:00:00 -0500

Low-latency systems fail when work becomes unbounded. Batching, conflation, and backpressure are mechanisms that keep systems stable under bursty, adversarial load. Without them, tail latency and cascading failures are inevitable.

Observability at Scale: Distributed Telemetry for Modern Trading Infrastructure

rundef — Sat, 13 Dec 2025 00:00:00 -0500

How do trading systems observe themselves in real time? This article breaks down the telemetry architecture that keeps distributed systems visible under extreme latency pressure.

How Exchanges Turn Order Books into Distributed Logs

rundef — Sat, 06 Dec 2025 00:00:00 -0500

Every modern exchange is a distributed database in disguise. This article reveals how trading engines transform chaotic streams of buy and sell orders into a perfectly ordered, replayable log, ensuring fairness, determinism, and market data reliability.

Latency Profiling in Python: From Code Bottlenecks to Observability

rundef — Sat, 29 Nov 2025 00:00:00 -0500

Learn how to pinpoint where time disappears in Python systems, from CPU and I/O bottlenecks to Prometheus metrics and continuous profilers. Explore the tools that turn raw measurements into observability dashboards revealing real performance patterns.

Understanding Latency: From Wire to Code

rundef — Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 -0500

Every microsecond counts, but where do they actually go?

This article traces the hidden journey of a message from the network wire to the application's code, revealing how the NIC, interrupts, syscalls, and runtimes introduce delay at every hop.

Dissecting the Infra of DeFi Protocols

rundef — Sat, 08 Nov 2025 00:00:00 -0500

Most DeFi discussions stop at smart contracts. This article goes deeper: through the data pipelines, executors, keepers, and coordination layers that make protocols run. If you're a software engineer, you'll see how DeFi architecture mirrors the systems you already know.

What Database Scaling Looks Like When Milliseconds Mean Millions

rundef — Sat, 01 Nov 2025 00:00:00 -0400

Financial systems process billions of time-series data points with sub-millisecond query requirements: constraints that break traditional databases.

Learn the architectural patterns that actually work: vertical scaling strategies, intelligent sharding schemes, and why market data demands different trade-offs than web applications.

Introduction to DeFi Engineering

rundef — Thu, 23 Oct 2025 00:00:00 -0400

An introduction to the engineering landscape in DeFi protocols: the distinct engineering roles (protocol, infrastructure, execution), the complete technology stack from smart contracts to off-chain systems, core primitives like liquidity pools and oracles, and what makes building in this space fundamentally different from traditional fintech.

How to Build Execution Systems for Crypto Trading at Scale

rundef — Sun, 12 Oct 2025 00:00:00 -0400

How do you execute $100M orders across 10+ crypto exchanges without moving the market? This deep-dive covers the infrastructure behind institutional trading systems: market data pipelines, smart order routing, execution quality metrics, and building for failure.

Ring Buffers 101: The Building Block of Low-Latency Systems

rundef — Sat, 04 Oct 2025 00:00:00 -0400

An introduction to ring buffers, a foundational data structure for low-latency systems. We'll cover how they work, why they're fast, common variants, and practical use cases in real-time applications.

Message-Oriented Architectures in Trading Systems: Patterns for Scalability and Fault Tolerance

rundef — Sat, 20 Sep 2025 00:00:00 -0400

Explore how message-oriented architectures power modern trading systems. Learn patterns, delivery guarantees, and broker trade-offs for high-frequency finance.

Canton: A Distributed Ledger for Global Finance

rundef — Sun, 07 Sep 2025 00:00:00 -0400

Traditional settlement takes 2-3 days because banks can't trust shared state. Canton Network changes this with domain-based consensus and cryptographic privacy.

First article in our Distributed Systems in Finance series: we examine how Canton's distributed ledger achieves real-time settlement without sacrificing confidentiality.

Interdependence of returns across multiple strategies

rundef — Mon, 03 Mar 2025 00:00:00 -0500

Many trading strategies show low correlations on paper, but that doesn't mean they're independent. In this article, we will explore the hidden risks in trading portfolios by understanding the interdependence of strategies and the limitations of correlation as a sole risk measure.

Setting up an Ubuntu 24.04 EC2 instance for algorithmic trading with Interactive Brokers

rundef — Fri, 28 Feb 2025 00:00:00 -0500

This article walks through the steps of setting up a new EC2 instance for algorithmic trading using Ubuntu 24.04 and Interactive Brokers. Running trading algorithms on EC2 provides scalability, reliability, and cost efficiency and is suitable for both paper and live accounts.