Bitfinex, the popular bitcoin and cryptocurrency exchange platform, today announced it has deployed a proprietary surveillance tool — Shimmer — to combat market abuse and help promote orderly trading.
Dubbed Shimmer — a term also used to describe a bee’s way of defending its hive, the market alert, and reporting tool will identify and investigate possible manipulative behaviors and suspicious trading practices; with the goal of improving market integrity.
Shimmer has been designed to operate seamlessly with Hive; Bitfinex’s distributed, multi-threaded and multi-process matching engine built around speed, stability, and scalability.
The surveillance tool leverages the expertise that the exchange’s market surveillance team has gathered since the exchange’s inception in 2012. Bitfinex’s team of specialists will be alerted to incidences of potential improper trading activity on the platform via email summaries of suspicious trading patterns across all trading pairs listed on the exchange, including futures and margin funding products.
Further, Shimmer will help combat abusive practices in the market such as wash trading; where a trader buys and sells an instrument with the intent of misleading the market. Also, layering; when a trader uses non-bona-fide orders to mislead others regarding actual supply or demand in the market.
“Comprehensive market and trade surveillance capabilities are integral to operating a leading cryptocurrency exchange. To meet the complex needs of an evolving digital asset class and to protect our sophisticated participants; Bitfinex has chosen to develop its own state-of-the-art surveillance system.”
– Paolo Ardoino, CTO at Bitfinex
Shimmer utilizes the Rust programming language for the high-speed processing of voluminous trade and order data. “This tool is especially relevant for our futures and margin funding products,” said Ardoino. “We chose to use the Rust programming language for its execution speed and programming safety.”
Bitfinex’s high-performance infrastructure and connectivity supports a variety of trading strategies. The company offers a variety of services; including margin trading with up to 5x leverage, and perpetual swap contracts offering 100x leverage through its affiliate, iFinex Financial Technologies Limited.
