Deribit upgrades matching engine, cuts median latency by roughly 61x

Deribit has replaced the engine at the heart of its exchange. The new system, called Starbase, cut median request-response latency from 4.7 ms to 76 µs, an improvement of approximately 61 times. The more eye-catching number sits further out on the curve. Tail latency, the slowest 1% of requests, improved by roughly 531 times, which is why Deribit describes the upgrade as reducing latency by over 500 times. What Starbase actually changed Deribit’s previous system, known as the Classic engine, has now been retired in favor of Starbase. The new engine processes more than 100,000 orders per second with sub-millisecond matching. Median latency fell from 4.7 ms to 76 µs. A microsecond is one-thousandth of a millisecond, so the typical order now completes its round trip in a small fraction of the time it used to take. The p99 figure captures the slowest 1% of requests, and it dropped from 124 ms to 234 µs. Under the Classic engine, a trader’s slowest orders could hang for over a tenth of a second. Under Starbase, even the stragglers finish in well under a millisecond. Post-launch data shows Starbase handling a peak of 23,836 requests in a single second. Fairness, not just speed Starbase e...