Dissecting the Infra of DeFi Protocols

Posted on Sat 08 November 2025 | Part 2 of DeFi Engineering | 15 min read

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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.


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What Database Scaling Looks Like When Milliseconds Mean Millions

Posted on Sat 01 November 2025 | Part 3 of Distributed Systems in Finance | 12 min read

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Financial systems process billions of time-series data points with sub-millisecond query requirements: constraints that break traditional databases. Scaling these workloads requires different architectural choices, from vertical scaling to intelligent sharding schemes and specialized layouts for market data.


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Introduction to DeFi Engineering

Posted on Thu 23 October 2025 | Part 1 of DeFi Engineering | 14 min read

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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.


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How to Build Execution Systems for Crypto Trading at Scale

Posted on Sun 12 October 2025 | Part 3 of Building Real Trading Systems | 35 min read

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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.


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

Posted on Sat 04 October 2025 | Part 4 of Low-Latency Fundamentals | 12 min read

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Ring buffers are a foundational data structure in low-latency systems. Their memory layout enables predictable performance and high throughput in real-time workloads such as trading engines, telemetry pipelines, and network processing.


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

Posted on Sat 20 September 2025 | Part 2 of Distributed Systems in Finance | 23 min read

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Modern trading systems rely on message-oriented architectures to move market data, orders, and risk events between services with predictable latency. Delivery guarantees, broker architectures, and ordering constraints shape how these systems behave under load.


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Canton: A Distributed Ledger for Global Finance

Posted on Sun 07 September 2025 | Part 1 of Distributed Systems in Finance | 10 min read

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Traditional settlement takes days because banks cannot trust shared state. Canton Network addresses this with domain-based consensus and cryptographic privacy, enabling real-time settlement without sacrificing confidentiality.


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Interdependence of returns across multiple strategies

Posted on Mon 03 March 2025 | Part 2 of Building Real Trading Systems | 9 min read

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Low correlation between strategies does not guarantee independence. Hidden dependencies between trading strategies can create concentrated portfolio risk, especially during regime shifts where correlations suddenly converge.


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

Posted on Fri 28 February 2025 | Part 1 of Building Real Trading Systems | 5 min read

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Provisioning cloud infrastructure is a common step when moving trading systems from local development to production. This guide shows how to deploy an Ubuntu 24.04 EC2 instance and connect it to Interactive Brokers.


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