BitMEX boosts liquidity with 10-minute cutover to AWS Tokyo Region

As a cryptocurrency derivatives exchange serving professional traders globally, BitMEX had historically operated its trading platform in the AWS Europe (Ireland) Region, where it initially led market activity. As the crypto ecosystem expanded, trading venues, liquidity providers, and high-frequency trading firms began concentrating in Tokyo, creating a network effect that shifted market activity toward Asia Pacific.

With more than 200 milliseconds of latency between Ireland and Japan, BitMEX faced growing constraints in serving this evolving market. Traders arbitraging across exchanges needed near-instant execution, and the physical distance between regions limited participation from firms operating in Tokyo. To remain competitive and unlock new liquidity, BitMEX needed to relocate its trading platform closer to these participants.

Migrating the exchange introduced significant technical complexity. BitMEX needed to synchronize a multi-petabyte production environment across regions with sub-second accuracy while maintaining performance on its existing AWS infrastructure. The company also needed to avoid extended downtime during the transition, as even brief disruptions could prevent traders from managing positions and lead to involuntary liquidations in highly volatile markets.

Karl Taylor, head of DevOps at BitMEX, says, “A brief outage may have little impact, but Bitcoin is highly volatile. Even short disruptions can affect traders, so we have to be precise—we call it threading the needle.”

Over three months, BitMEX replicated its trading platform from the AWS Europe (Ireland) Region to the AWS Asia Pacific (Tokyo) Region, ensuring that the final cutover required only a few configuration changes. The company replicated its trading engine, databases, retail frontend, and funds and custody systems on Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), using infrastructure as code to maintain consistency across regions.

To synchronize data without disrupting live operations, BitMEX implemented cross-Region replication across its platform. Amazon Virtual Private Cloud Container Network Interface (Amazon VPC CNI) supported advanced transparent routing between environments, while AWS Transit Gateway simplified cross-Region connectivity and AWS DataSync supported the transfer of additional system state.

BitMEX enabled teams in Tokyo to work against a near-real-time version of its trading environment by implementing a distributed data architecture across Regions. Using the write forwarding feature in Amazon Aurora Global Database, teams in Tokyo could perform local reads while forwarding writes across Regions, maintaining consistency and responsiveness during testing.

Taylor explains, “We needed to move data between Regions faster, but we couldn’t overcome the limits of physics.” He adds, “With fast local reads and cross-Region writes, it seemed we had defied the speed of light. The platform felt the same in the primary and secondary Regions, even though replication was going on. Everything was transparent to the development team.”

BitMEX conducted more than 100 reversible failover tests across development and test environments to validate performance and ensure a predictable cutover. By the time of migration, approximately 99 percent of the platform was already running in parallel in the AWS Asia Pacific (Tokyo) Region. The final transition required only minimal configuration changes, including switching the trade matching engine from the AWS Europe (Ireland) Region to Tokyo, swapping the primary Region for the Amazon Aurora database in a single click, and updating the Domain Name System.

BitMEX completed the cutover in 10 minutes, significantly faster than the 12 hours originally planned. Taylor says, “We planned for 12 hours of downtime to be safe but completed the cutover in 10 minutes. We were able to bring the platform back online almost immediately.”

Furthermore, the move to the Tokyo Region attracted institutional market makers and increased liquidity across the platform. With single-digit millisecond order execution latency on the vast majority of requests, firms previously limited by latency constraints can now participate. This contributed to a more than 185 percent increase in liquidity across nine perpetual contracts, including Bitcoin, improving price depth and trading conditions. Taylor adds, “By migrating to the AWS Tokyo Region, we’ve gained access to a larger pool of customers because we’re meeting them where they are instead of expecting them to come to us.”

Beyond latency improvements, the migration gave BitMEX an opportunity to restructure an infrastructure that had evolved over time. The company segmented its environment into multiple AWS accounts managed through AWS Organizations, improving security, cost visibility, and operational independence.

Taylor says, “The move to the AWS Tokyo Region gave us a chance to restructure our infrastructure. With AWS account segmentation, we now have better control, clearer ownership, and a more efficient way to operate.”