100x Group provides grants of over US$215,000 to µWebSockets developer Alex Hultman

100x Group are delighted to announce our continued financial support to open source developer Alex Hultman for his work on µWS. The project provides high-quality, lightweight, and scalable websocket support for NodeJS systems, allowing us to have a smaller server footprint to support our clients without sacrificing reliability.

Alex introduced stream compression to the project as BitMEX data volumes grew and over the years this has reduced our egress bandwidth substantially. More recently, Alex has completed extensive fuzz testing of the code and added support for Node Worker threads as well as alternative SSL stacks, Node JS, and support for new platforms such as macOS on Apple Silicon. An ongoing focus has been to push for extremely low per-connection overheads to allow 100k+ connections on mobile-class processors: 

Looking to the future, client support for QUIC / HTTP3 is maturing. This opens up opportunities for us to continue to contribute to Alex’s planned work in this area, especially the upcoming QuicTransport feature, which looks like it could become the next evolution of WebSockets, helping further with low latency use cases.

100x Group has provided Alex with grants of US$86,000 annually since 2018 and will continue to support his projects going forward. Commenting on the funding, Alex said:

I’d like to thank 100x Group for supporting this project and encouraging me to approach it independently; without this support none of it would be possible

We are delighted to showcase Alex’s work under the 100x Group open source developer grant program. We believe it is the duty of organisations like ours to help nourish the ecosystems in which we exist, giving back where possible to the open source projects from which we benefit. Without the millions of hours from open source developers powering everything from our operating systems to our web servers to Bitcoin itself, the BitMEX trading platform could not have been built.