Notes from running an exchange.
Guides on building, costing and licensing crypto infrastructure, written by the engineers who operate it.
Blockchain RPC failover: what a normal load balancer gets wrong
An HTTP 200 can still be an outage, a revert is not a node failure, and a signed transaction must never be sent twice by accident. The rules in the RPC gateway behind the EX5 exchange.
Read more607 alert emails: how we stopped our exchange monitoring from crying wolf
Every rule alerted on its first bad minute and closed on its first good one. What filled the inbox, the hysteresis rules we use now, and why 'could not measure' is not a recovery.
Read moreWhen three price sources are not enough: guarding an exchange's reference price
A median of several venues, a minimum source count and a 15% brake protect an exchange's USD prices. Two of those rules froze prices they were meant to protect. What we changed.
Read moreCutting blockchain RPC costs: how we went from 17 million to about 5.6 million calls a month
We sized our RPC plan for 2–5 million calls a month and measured 17 million. Where the calls came from, what removed them, and what each change cost in latency.
Read moreHow to build a crypto wallet app in 2026: custody model, recovery, and getting through the stores
What we learned shipping a custodial wallet on Android, iOS, macOS and Windows: the custody decision, recovery without a seed phrase, send safety, and store review.
Read moreHow to cut TRON energy costs for USDT transfers: what we measured in production
A TRC-20 USDT transfer cost us 6.43 or 13.03 TRX, depending on the recipient. Measured receipts, the 1 USDT reserve, the fee_limit trap, and burn vs rent vs stake.
Read moreWhy USDT deposits get stuck: the failure classes we found in production
Silent minimums, sweeps marked done without a receipt, an empty gas tank, scanners that die quietly: deposit failures we found running EX5, and the alert for each.
Read moreExchange liquidity without parking capital: how order-book mirroring and JIT hedging work
Why liquidity, not software, is a new exchange’s costliest problem, and how mirroring with JIT hedging quotes deep books at real prices with almost no inventory.
Read moreHow to build a crypto exchange in 2026: the parts, the costs, the order
What an exchange actually consists of, what each part costs to build or buy, and the sequence that gets a licensed operator live without burning a year.
Read moreWhat crypto exchange software costs in 2026: open source, white-label, in-house, licensed
Published price ranges for the four ways to get an exchange, with the hidden lines that move the total: liquidity capital, operations, custody, app-store review.
Read moreWhat regulators ask a crypto exchange for: the technical file, explained
The technical sections of a VASP or CASP application, what evidence each one needs, and which parts your software vendor should hand you ready-made.
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