About Virtuse Group
Virtuse Group is one of the largest carbon emissions, power and gas trader in Europe and China. Their team consists of knowledgeable professionals from leading financial institutions in Europe, to experienced blockchain experts and developers in Asia. Virtuse has a balanced team with a wide field of experience in cryptocurrencies, investment banking, commodities trading, start-ups, and consulting. With trading in different areas, the company wanted to start the trading of cryptocurrencies and other digital assets and wanted to connect crypto assets with commodities, bridging the old financial market with the new.
Challenges
The ever evolving blockchains undergo major protocol level changes while we try to implement them. Forking of coins is one of the major such challenges
Exchange liquidity is another major challenge faced by us. When we launch exchange, our exchanges do not have enough liquidity to show to users. We lack data for our charts and do not have liquidity for our orders.
Managing different blockchain and their nodes and keeping them in sync with real blockchain was bottleneck for us.
Another major challenge is finding a trade-off between setting up nodes or using 3rd party services like Block.io and BitGo.
Solution
- We need to be always updated with any protocol level changes on any of the coins we integrate into our exchange. Sometimes we have to re-wamp logics to support these changes. One example is, forking of BCH happened after we implemented it in our exchange. We need to support any one of the forked coins, preventing replay attacks. We supported BCH-ABC after consensus from client and handled exceptional cases that arised due to fork in coin.
- Our dev team proposed a solution to the liquidity and lack of data problem. We fetch the data for 3rd party services like Binance unless we get sufficient data to be displayed on platforms, like the price of coins.
- We also used 3rd party exchanges to provide liquidity to our exchange platform unless we gain some minimum thresholds. These liquidity providers help us fulfill our trades.
- We used different failovers scripts to manage our blockchains networks. This problem is quite generally faced by almost everyone in exchanges domain. Our other application Zeeve is aimed to solve this problem.
- The trade-off of using 3rd party BAAS providers vs using our node requires our dev team to figure out security, user base and cost as parameters. Using BAAS providers becomes easy and ready-made solution reducing development costs but the service costs increase with an increase in user base. This approach also bears a security risk of fetching transaction details from a 3rd party. Setting up own node comes with the initial cost of setting up nodes and maintenance cost of the nodes but they later are not impacted by increase in user base and provides more security to our blockchain solution. We provide a personalized solution to the trade-off depending on precise requirements keeping future expansion in mind.
Impact
Prolitus has helped clients to deploy exchange with lots of automated features like deposits, withdrawals, KYC. Detailed accounting in the form of reports helped our client to get a clear picture of trades happening on platform along with complete details of cryptos and fiats moving in and out of the system.
The secure exchange architecture provided by Prolitus helped clients increase their user base and also the future-ready architecture of exchange helped clients add/remove any crypto-curreny easily making their exchange more flexible and user-friendly.
Prolitus provided different UX experience to traders depending on their trading experience level. Users can switch the view from normal to advanced level with a single click. The advanced view has more detailed charts and more trade features. This helped client to cater different kinds of users for their product.
Conclusion
Implementation of crypto currency exchange was a good learning experience of our team along with providing more satisfactory solution to the client.
The architecture of exchange developed by Prolitus has evolved over a period of time providing a set of pluggable features which clients may plug/unplug in just a few clicks. The security of exchanges are managed by Blockchain and Security experts at Prolitus.
Prolitus has proved its expertise in Blockchain and security domain along with catering every requirement of client without compromising flexibility and future-ready architecture of exchange.
