State of the Platform: Feb 26, 2018

Last week was extremely busy! BitMEX’s engineering team is expanding rapidly while we face new scaling challenges daily. We know users demand better performance than we are delivering, and fixing this issue is our top priority.

  • The engine team continues to work tirelessly on performance. Milestones:
    • We have successfully split orderbook processing from the main engine. This resulted in a ~14% capacity increase across the board.
    • We are staging and benchmarking another significant capacity increase. This particular update will fix the aberrant behavior experienced at about 13:00 UTC on Feb 26 (today).
    • We have expanded a suite of fine-grained metrics and dashboards probing every part of trading engine performance, allowing us to instantly measure when our updates improve capacity and how.
    • We are dramatically expanding the size of the engine team to deal with our new challenges as we continue to grow high double-digit percentages per month.
    • We continue to tweak load shedding to improve performance for the majority of our users. We have split rate limiting between frontend and API users to ease this, and started shedding more expensive functions. If you access BitMEX via API, please subscribe to our API Announcements RSS Feed (see the sidebar).
  • The NEO contest has concluded. We have chosen to award two users with the first prize of $50,000, for a total prize pool of $125,000, up from $100,000. Thanks for participating.
  • We’ve published a new Crypto Trader Digest and Research article (Tether).
  • SegWit support is being trialed in Testnet. We have suspended immediate work for the moment while we focus on engine scaling.
  • We’ve brought up a new frontend and design team that is starting to produce great work. This is part of an engineering scaling effort that began last year. This team is working on new data visualizations and design improvements to the frontend, as well as a new mobile app. Progress on this is very encouraging and we hope to have a released Alpha version with basic ticker & charting support very soon.
    • Please send us your wish list! Our intent is to release early and release often, so the first version of the BitMEX app is intended to be for price discovery only. While the feature count may be low, we expect to build a best-in-class, polished experience that delivers the data traders want to see, as soon as they open the app.
  • BitMEX is hiring! If you’re a motivated developer with serious frontend, mobile, or backend chops, we want you to be part of the team building the highest-volume crypto exchange on the planet. See our Careers Page for more.