Bitfinex has announced that it will seek to overhaul the back-end of its trading exchange through a new partnership with AlphaPoint.
One of the top bitcoin exchanges by USD trading volume, Bitfinex is currently in beta, yet it already offers a number of advanced trading features including margin trading and tradeable mining contracts.
The Hong Kong-based exchange said the partnership will help ensure its platform can scale to meet the growing international demand for bitcoin trading.
Although notable for Bitfinex, the partnership also represents arguably the first major deal for AlphaPoint, the bitcoin exchange solution provider that launched earlier this month with $1.35m in funding. AlphaPoint’s partners to date have been mostly smaller, regional exchanges such as Canada’s Cointrader, Norway’s BitcoinsNorway and Latin America’s meXBT.
Speaking to CoinDesk, AlphaPoint CEO Vadim Telyatnikov said the partnership would add credibility to the company’s offerings and boost the appeal of its solutions.
He explained:
“Bitfinex did its diligence and decided that our platform is secure and scalable enough to grow with their needs. I definitely think that’s going to help the conversations we’re having with startups, but especially with institutions.”
Telyatnikov suggested that AlphaPoint has been engaging with traditional Wall Street firms, many of whom are taking a deeper look at the opportunities in the bitcoin space.
Seeking enterprise solutions
Launched in 2013, Bitfinex’s trading volumes have grown rapidly, as attested by data from Bitcoinity (see chart). The exchange has grown from facilitating less than 10,000 BTC in trades per day in April to between 30,000–50,000 BTC per day in October.
Source: BitcoinityBitfinex indicated that it chose to partner with AlphaPoint because the firm had made a convincing argument its solution could be more robust than one developed in-house.
“Once we had the opportunity to look under the hood of the AlphaPoint platform, we found them to have the best enterprise back-end solution to address our needs for the present and the future,” Bitfinex’s VP of business development Josh Rossi said.
In particular, Bitfinex cited the ability for AlphaPoint to help it process a million transactions per second as a key factor in the decision making, citing the sometimes rapid increase in trading that can occur on the exchange.
“We can support multiple coins, not just bitcoin, but any digital currency,” Telyatnikov added. “We also support all the transitional APIs and gateways that Wall Street is used to using.”
User experience consistency
AlphaPoint’s Telyatnikov indicated that while the partnership has been announced, the actual back-end migration of the Bitfinex exchange has yet to be completed.
“The migration does take some time and we’re in the middle of that,” he said. “I don’t want to give specific dates, but we definitely expect it to happen in the next month or two.”
Founder Joe Ventura provided additional details, noting that it will now seek to migrate Bitfinex’s database to its platform.
“For a short period of time, we’ll be running both systems in parallel to make sure everything is functioning as normal,” he explained. “Then, we’ll do a full transition and unplug their back-end and everything will ride on our back-end.”
Ventura said that Bitfinex customers shouldn’t notice any changes during the transition process, as user interface will remain the same.
“It should be seamless,” he concluded.
Images via Bitcoinity, Bitfinex and Shutterstock