Making low-latency crypto trading accessible using AWS with Gemini

Financial institutions and individual cryptocurrency traders worldwide access Gemini through mobile and desktop applications. The company’s latency-critical workloads operate in the Equinix NY5 data center (NY5) in New Jersey, a facility that financial institutions widely use. Customers with hardware in NY5 can trade with submillisecond latency by building cross-connections between their servers and Gemini’s systems.

Most of Gemini’s customers didn’t lease server space in NY5 because of cost or operational constraints. “Accessing hardware in NY5 typically involves working with third-party providers,” says Paget Stanco, head of institutional at Gemini. “Although those partners are effective, the process requires more coordination, resulting in longer onboarding times and higher costs.”

As information traveled from NY5, cloud-connected customers experienced up to 12 ms of latency, putting some high-frequency trading customers at a disadvantage. Gemini wanted to reduce latency for those customers without significantly increasing its compute spend. The company turned to AWS to bring its extensive global infrastructure closer to users.

Gemini has used AWS services for years to run a broad range of cloud workloads. For latency-critical workloads that must remain in NY5, the company uses AWS Outposts—a family of fully managed services that deliver AWS infrastructure and services to virtually any on-premises or edge location. These services provide a high-performance solution that helps financial institutions connect locally with minimal latency. “Using AWS Outposts, we can homogenize our tooling, solidify the required performance characteristics for our services, and make our bare-metal maintenance easier—and in some cases, nonexistent,” says Jacob Olsen, head of platform at Gemini.

Gemini worked alongside AWS solutions architects to identify the right approach for reducing its reliance on proprietary hardware while minimizing tick-to-trade latency for users outside NY5. To minimize tick-to-trade latency for users outside NY5, the company selected AWS Local Zones, infrastructure deployments that bring core AWS services like compute, storage, and networking to where end users are, supporting low-latency needs.

With this architecture, Gemini can deploy API gateways in over 30 AWS Local Zones locations worldwide, using AWS Direct Connect to improve application performance by connecting directly to AWS and bypassing the public internet. This architecture reduces the network path between users and Gemini’s systems, reducing round-trip latency while avoiding public internet routing. Because trading demand varies throughout the day, Gemini benefits from pay-as-you-go pricing for AWS Local Zones—paying only for the compute capacity that it consumes.

AWS Local Zones integrate seamlessly with the AWS services and APIs that Gemini already uses. The company’s engineering team worked closely alongside AWS to configure routing through AWS Direct Connect and validate performance across environments. “Because AWS Local Zones have the same interface as the other services we use, we greatly simplified our application development,” says Yucong Sun, director of software engineering at Gemini. “We can use one application code, one deployment pipeline, and one monitoring solution across our workloads both inside and outside NY5.”

By using AWS Local Zones, Gemini cut average tick-to-trade latency for cloud-connected customers to below 2 ms—a reduction of over 80 percent compared to the nearest AWS Region. These customers can monitor and trade at speeds closer to customers with hardware in NY5, and can onboard onto Gemini’s solution in hours, compared with weeks or longer in the data center.

Using this low-latency infrastructure, Gemini also used AWS Local Zones for an NRT trading competition with quantitative finance clubs at 16 US universities. “Hundreds of students across the country received a small amount of capital on our platform and made real-world trades in NRT,” says Stanco. “We were able to meet demanding requirements for throughput, accessibility, and speed while creating a more level playing field.”

Gemini looks forward to continued work alongside AWS. “We love that AWS doesn’t try to upsell us,” says Olsen. “It works alongside us to find the right services—such as AWS Local Zones—to help save money and decrease latency.”