Although Connamara has been a well-respected name in capital markets technology for over a quarter of a century, our EP3 exchange platform has only been part of the conversation for 3+ years.
We launched EP3 to fill a demand in the marketplace for an end-to-end, asset-agnostic, cloud-first, exchange and clearing solution that offers fast deployment and cost-accessibility. The quick take-up of EP3 has exceeded our every expectation.
With innovative customers like Interactive Brokers’ ForecastEx predictions exchange, ZeroHash’s stablecoin platform, Brazil’s BEE4 tokenized stock market and ArchitectX’s perpetual futures exchange, EP3 has quickly established itself as a new breed of technology for the next generation of exchanges.
The TabbFORUM NOVA Awards honor the financial industry’s commitment to technology-driven innovation by recognizing 40 organizations for their outstanding achievements. As TabbFORUM noted in placing Connamara in this top 40:
“Experience with traditional markets and EP3’sfully integrated technology propelled EP3 to become a go-to vendor for start-up marketplaces”
Connamara’s fellow NOVA Award recipients include some of the largest and most forward-thinking players in capital markets today, including:
FIA’s Boca conference always delivers, and BOCA50 was no exception. In fact, it was an unrivaled success by any measure – record-breaking attendance, extraordinary speakers, lively panels, and, not to be forgotten, Cheap Trick!
Here’s how it went for Connamara Technologies, by the numbers:
📈 5 of our most innovative exchange customers in attendance—up from 3 last year. Exciting to see the growth of EP3!
🤝 30 scheduled meetings with customers, prospective customers, regulators and interested investors.—a new record for us. Still tallying up the countless “bump-ins” that make Boca special
🏓 2nd time hosting the pickleball clinic. Some have taken to calling us the “pickleball people”, thankfully others know us for being the “default DCM technology”
🏆 The 22nd Boca for our founder, Jim Downs. That’s more than two decades of market insights, relationships, and innovation.
I was 10 years old when I first walked onto the trading floor of the Chicago Board of Trade. My father was a broker in the corn pit, as was his father before him.
It was summertime, with the specter of a drought that would crush US corn yields. The trading was manic, with such intensity and urgency. I couldn’t begin to understand what was happening around me, but I knew it had to be important.
It was important then, and it is important now, because exchanges are important.
CME, ICE, CBOE, NASDAQ, Euronext, TSE, HKEX and bourses around the world are so deeply woven into the fabric of our global economy, it’s hard to fathom functioning capital markets without them.
And new exchanges are joining the fray, offering price discovery, price transparency and liquidity for emissions, niche commodities, sovereign instruments, events, crypto, tokenized assets and more.
On this, our 3rd birthday, I’m very proud to say that EP3 by Connamara Technologies is doing its part to enable this exciting new generation of exchanges and marketplaces.
With a hat tip to all the floor brokers and traders who paved the way.
Connamara Technologies was founded in the winter of 2022. Three years later, we are on a trajectory we couldn’t be more proud of. As we reflect on our nascent stage, servicing the innovation goals of a sharply growing list of global clients, we’d like to take a moment to share the lessons we’ve learned along the way.
To gain a deeper understanding, I contacted our team members and encouraged them to reflect on their experiences scaling and growing the EP3® matching engine and platform. After reviewing this feedback, I could not help but share their assessment of the last three years and our biggest takeaways. Their insights offer a collective perspective on the knowledge we have gained throughout our remarkable journey.
A Product Company Operates Differently Than a Services Company
Connamara Technologies grew out of our custom capital markets software development company, Connamara Systems, which has successfully delivered custom technology solutions for twenty-six years. Moving into the product space with EP3® required us to adopt a new way of thinking.
Building a product like EP3 demands a focus on scalability, standardization, and long-term roadmaps. We found that our historical experience in building bespoke solutions for our legacy clients was a double-edged sword when trying to build a product company.
When building software tailored to individual customer requirements, the default behavior is to create whatever the customer wants.
When building a product that serves a diverse market, you need to take a beat and evaluate each customer request against the product roadmap and the value of the change in terms of the product-market fit. Yet, our deep experience building custom solutions for clients gave us a unique edge—understanding how to listen to clients and respond to their diverse needs in an evolving landscape. Learning to balance these two worlds has been a challenge but ultimately a key to our success.
Innovation Comes From Customers
While we’ve recently invested in formal market research in our collaboration with Acuiti, some of our most groundbreaking ideas for our EP3 matching engine have come from simply listening to our customers.
Our diverse customers’ feedback, insights, and challenges have been invaluable in shaping and driving our innovation strategy. This is because our customers always push the envelope when developing new exchanges and marketplaces. Whether our customers have brought us a twist on the digital asset marketplace, a plan for a new exchange in an emerging economy, or an idea that’s never been attempted before in the current marketplace, we’ve grown with our clients to meet their expectations and evolving needs.
Great Documentation is as Valuable as Great Code
Clear, thorough documentation helps customers implement and use EP3® effectively, reduces onboarding friction, and provides valuable support. This allows us to spend more time working with our customers on complex problems and solutions, rather than questions that have been answered previously. By the same token, excellent documentation allows our customers’ operational and technical teams to be more efficient, thus lowering the total cost of ownership of EP3. Documentation is an investment that continues to pay dividends long after the code is written for the vendor and the customer alike.
As we celebrate our third anniversary, we’re excited to carry these lessons into the next chapter of our journey. Thank you to our customers, board, and team members for helping make these three years so impactful. Here’s to continued innovation, collaboration, and growth in the years ahead!
As Connamara Technologies looks back at 2024, we are grateful and humbled by a year of truly remarkable achievements and continued growth for our EP3® matching engine and platform. Connamara Technologies was founded in 2022, and we are thrilled to share that last year was our best yet. We look forward to all that 2025 will bring to our trusted clients and partners.
In 2024, EP3 was the technology behind the only 2 approved US futures exchanges (DCMs). And, as of December 31, 2024, 60% of DCMs currently awaiting approval rely on EP3 for their exchange technology. These include exciting new markets for commodities and events contracts.
Here’s a look at some of the key milestones and moments that shaped our journey:
A Viral Moment: EP3® and ForecastEx on Election Night
This watershed moment for our matching engine and trading platform was a crowning achievement of our year back in November 2024. Working in concert with ForecastEx’s internal teams, Connamara Technologies’ engineers monitored systems around the clock, ready to respond to surges in trade volume with precision and expertise. The team’s commitment went beyond standard duty, ensuring unparalleled service during this first-in-a-lifetime historic trading event.
BEE4 became Brazil’s first regulated tokenized stock market thanks to EP3 technology: BEE4, an over-the-counter (OTC) market for small and midsize enterprises (SMEs) and Brazil’s first authorized infrastructure to trade tokenized stocks saw the upgrade and re-launch of its tokenized stock market project, powered by EP3. Watch the case study video below, or read about how we leveraged our technology to support their long-term evolution.
Zero Hash implements its digital asset platform, powered by EP3: In October, Connamara Technologies and Zero Hash announced that Zero Hash successfully implemented its digital asset platform, powered by the proprietary EP3® matching engine. EP3’s flexibility allows Zero Hash to explore new use cases, further solidifying its position as the leading infrastructure provider for start-ups, enterprises, and Fortune 500 companies, powering a diverse range of use cases: cross-border payments, commerce, trading, remittance, payroll, tokenization, wallets and on and off-ramps. Read the full press release here.
Google Cloud Partnership: In May, Connamara Technologies announced that it joined Google Cloud at the partner level for the Build engagement model. This gives Google Cloud customers the ability to create financial exchanges and other exchange technology solutions that are built with and run on Google Cloud. Read about key features here.
Industry Engagements
Conferences, Panels, and Sponsorships: In 2024, Connamara Technologies was seen at dozens of conferences around the world. Top highlights included:
Sponsoring the Pickleball Clinic at FIA BOCA at The Boca Raton.
Co-Founder James Downs speaking on the “How to Leverage Technology to Enhance Environmental Markets” panel at the Environmental Markets Association Annual Meeting
Co-Founder James Downs speaking at Amazon Web Services HQ in NYC on the “Trading in the Cloud” panel at a semi-private event, titled, “Modernizing the Trade Lifecycle”
Attending Consensus 2024 in Austin, where we got to see Mike Cagney (of Figure Markets, an EP3 customer) speak on “The Exchange of Everything.”
Our founders, James and Maureen Downs, collaborated with The Association of Futures Markets (AFM) and market intelligence firm Acuiti to lead an on-demand webinar titled “Building the Future of Exchanges: How Technology Enables Growth.” Watch the full free webinar here.
Our founders also appeared on the Exchange Invest IPO-VID Livestream to speak with Patrick L. Young on an episode titled “The Future of Exchange Matching Engines.”
Maureen Downs also got to share a bit of exchange history on the SmarterMarkets podcast. See the video here.
Award Nominations: Our EP3 matching engine was nominated for three awards this year. We were honored to attend all of these award ceremonies in-person and connect face-to-face with our fellow nominees and leaders in exchange technology.
Disruptor of the Year 2024 at the U.S. FinTech Awards
Best Matching Engine at the 2024 Benzinga FinTech Deal Day Awards
Best Matching Engine for Exchanges and Electronic Trading Venues at the 2024 TradingTech Insight Awards USA
New Features and Functionality for EP3
2024 was a year of significant upgrades for EP3, with enhancements focused on user experience, efficiency, and adaptability to meet the dynamic needs of the market. We made nearly a dozen upgrades to future-proof and enhance our product. Find out more details here.
Acuiti Study: Connamara Technologies sponsored market intelligence firm, Acuiti’s whitepaper report on Building Competitive Technology for Exchanges of the Future. This study was shared around the industry in trade papers like Waters and TabbForum, JLN News and more. The fascinating findings, which surveyed and interviewed 58 senior executives at derivatives exchanges from around the world, can be downloaded here.
The Ultimate Guide: Our team self-published The Ultimate Guide to Exchange Technology, which is a quick and easy explainer on the elements of comprehensive exchange infrastructure, tips for accelerating the launch of your exchange, crucial questions to ask a potential infrastructure partner and what to expect during the exchange design and build process. Download our free e-booklet here.
Last year, Connamara Technologies made significant strides in improving EP3, not just in performance—enhancing reporting speeds, pre-trade risk, scalability, and transaction throughput—but also in functionality. By analyzing the ever-evolving landscape of the exchange world, staying on top of what innovators need most, and building features through our discovery process, we made immense expansions to our matching engine product and platform’s capabilities.
Enhanced and Streamlined Exchange Operations
We focused on making exchange operations smoother and more efficient:
Block Trade Submission Improvements: Streamlined the submission process for exchange operators.
24/7/365 Exchange Support: Updated Trade Date functionality and end-of-day market actions, making it easier for exchanges to operate continuously.
Bulk Settlement Price Management: Simplified end-of-day workflows by enabling operators to bulk upload and approve settlement prices.
Advanced Risk and Compliance Management
Risk management and regulatory compliance remain at the core of EP3. This year, we delivered several impactful upgrades:
Omnibus Account Support: Helped Futures Commission Merchants (FCMs) manage accounts more efficiently.
Position Limits: Introduced account-level limits to enhance pre-trade risk management.
Pre-Trade Risk for Event Instruments: We have added support for Binary and Continuous payouts, empowering customers to design creative event contracts.
Regulatory Report Enhancements: We introduced support for spreads, improving compliance with regulatory standards.
Greater Integration and Flexibility
We expanded EP3’s adaptability to meet diverse needs:
Multiplatform CPU Support: Enabled customers to select their preferred CPU architecture, improving cost-efficiency and performance.
Banking Integration: Added support for J.P. Morgan Chase to complement existing BMO Harris infrastructure, providing more options for managing exchange collateral accounts.
Customizable Revenue Options and New Capabilities
We’ve made it easier for exchanges to tailor their revenue models and grow their business:
Flat Fee Commissions: Introduced a new commission model, giving customers the flexibility to structure fees that suit their needs.
Clearinghouse Technology Licensing: Expanded EP3’s offerings by making our clearinghouse technology available for licensing, opening new opportunities for emerging exchanges.
Acuiti and EP3 by Connamara Technologies recently partnered on a research project designed to understand how emerging and frontier market exchanges were approaching opportunities in the global listed derivatives markets.
In this Connamara Technologies Spotlight, we highlight how EP3 technology powered BEE4, Brazil’s first regulated tokenized stock market. Patricia Stille, CEO and Co-Founder, Rodrigo Fiszman, Co-Founder and Chairman, and Paloma Sevilha, Head of Products, speak on BEE4’s innovative trading platform and how our matching engine, our customized approach, and our support services allowed their technology to thrive. The full Case Study on our work with the Sao Paolo company illuminates how BEE4 leveraged Connamara Tech’s APIs to customize their exchange precisely to their specifications, adapting certain rules to align with the Brazilian market.
We chose Connamara’s solution after evaluating other providers across the globe. This is the kind of partnership that is key: not only to develop the SME segment but also to expand to other niches and scale up.
– Patricia Stille, CEO and Co-Founder of BEE4
Transcript:
Patricia Stille, CEO and Co-Founder of BEE4: BEE4 is a pioneering OTC market in Brazil focused on SMEs and one of the first initiatives globally using blockchain and regulated market infrastructure. With the creation of this new market, SMEs can gain access to capital markets, fund their expansion strategies, and improve their visibility. At the same time, clients can benefit from IPOs and trade shares of high-potential firms typically unavailable in traditional exchanges.
Rodrigo Fiszman, Co-Founder and Chairman: BEE4’s trading model has a weekly auction with tunnel prices, so, at the end of the day, you can only put orders and input a trade between the tunnels in the auction. Since we’re talking about small and medium companies with less liquidity, we were focused on reducing the volatility for the owners, entrepreneurs, of those companies. BEE4 received its license in September 2021. From that day ’till one year after we launched, we were able to have more than 6,000 investors in our trading venues. We had four IPOs in a period when you didn’t have any IPOs in Brazil.
Paloma Sevilha, Head of Products: Connamara Technologies is the company behind EP3. EP3 is the order-matching engine and the exchange trading platform behind BEE4 operations and other exchanges worldwide. We chose EP3 for a few reasons. First of them, they are a well-established exchange platform. Second reason, they were very open to building these new features with BEE4. And third, they were part of the project regarding the FIX protocol which is something that is crucial for business. EP3 is very asset-neutral. And in BEE4 we work with tokenized stocks. And, we’re planning to work with different assets. We can have all these assets in EP3. We can just create a product and we can build that in a few minutes just with a few clicks. Besides that, we have the Connamara support team that is available 24/7. We work from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m., so we do need a team that is available for longer hours in case there are any bugs or any questions or any maintenance needed. They’re there and they answer really quick.
Rodrigo Fiszman, Co-Founder and Chairman: So, in the end of the day, having Connamara as a partner and using EP3, it was all about scalability and also leveraging ready-made solutions that allow us to gain a head start.
Patricia Stille, CEO and Co-Founder of BEE4: We chose Connamara’s solution after evaluating other providers across the globe. This is the kind of partnership that is key: not only to develop the SME segment but also to expand to other niches and scale up.
Building Competitive Technology for the Exchanges of the Future is a report on the relationship between investment and growth at exchanges around the world. Conducted in partnership between Acuiti and Connamara Technologies, this report interrogates how emerging and frontier markets, tier 2 and 3, and new exchanges are targeting growth in modern global markets.
As developers, one of our perpetual goals is to ensure our systems, such as our exchange matching engine software, run as efficiently as possible, using the minimum required resources to achieve maximum performance. Recently, we embarked upon an effort to reduce EP3™’s memory footprint by auditing our live memory usage and attempting to trim out as much unnecessary overhead as we could find.
Our team was inspired by the needs of our high-volume customers – who pump a large magnitude of orders through our exchange matching software daily. The result? We were able to:
inspect our memory heap
cut out 10x of our steady-state memory usage
minimize bursts of memory required during peak activity.
Read more to find out how we executed this incredible revamp of our matching engine technology.
Deploying Go’s pprof Tooling
We turned to Go’s internal pprof tooling – a powerful suite for profiling applications through visualization and analysis of data. It can help us analyze CPU usage, memory allocation, and more while our services run live in a test environment. For our purposes, we focused on heap profiling to understand and optimize memory usage while under high load in a real Kubernetes cluster.
First, we needed to enable pprof across all of our Go microservices. This is remarkably straightforward. By importing the net/http/pprof package and setting up a temporary HTTP server, we could access various profiling endpoints while ensuring that the debugging behavior is off by default for production workloads.
With this setup, we could access the pprof endpoints by navigating tohttp://localhost:<our forwarded port>/debug/pprof/ in our browser after forwarding each service’s port from the Kubernetes cluster to our local development machine. To dump the heap after forcing a garbage collection event, we hit the GET /debug/pprof/heap?gc=1endpoint and saved locally. Then, we ran go tool pprof -http=:8082 heap.out to visualize the heap like so:
Through this view, we were able to determine that there were 2 internal caches that were unnecessarily large for their particular use case within our codebase, so we reduced their size. This eliminated a large chunk of our memory footprint, but we were still seeing nominal utilization increases under bursts of exchange activity. We believed we could still do better!
An Assist From gogctuner
gogctuner is a library designed to fine-tune Go’s garbage collector (GC). By default, the GC is conservative about releasing memory back to the OS, which can lead to higher memory usage than necessary. This library provides the means to adjust the aggressiveness of the garbage collector, allowing us to strike a balance between application performance and memory usage.
With more frequent garbage collection and memory release, our system experienced more consistent performance and reduced latency variance across all of EP3. The reduced memory usage also meant less pressure on each node’s memory in Kubernetes, leading to overall better resource utilization.
Go’s pprof tooling proved invaluable in our quest to optimize memory usage and boost system performance. By systematically identifying and addressing memory hotspots, we improved our application’s efficiency and gained more profound insights into Go’s memory management.
Going Forward
We’ve identified and optimized memory hotspots, so our matching engine technology, EP3, continues to operate like a well-oiled machine. For any developer looking to optimize their Go applications, pprof is an essential tool. It provides a window into your application’s performance, helping you make informed decisions and implement effective optimizations. Now, we want all our customers to benefit from these enhancements. Tuning recommendations and more details are available in our documentation.
