Infrastructure is on fire. With new tokens and stablecoins ruling Twitter headlines in 2021, trading venues and the crypto exchange market are now growing at a breakneck pace and competition is fierce. More than 30 exchanges raised significant funding rounds last year, and the trend shows no signs of letting up.
This means that in order to build a competitive advantage, exchanges need to move fast, and grab market share. Both centralized and decentralized exchanges need to scale as quickly as possible—and with the talent shortage that already exists in crypto, developers have little time to focus on creating their own trading utilities, like charts, order tickets, portfolio management or other data visualizations.
The real value comes down to great marketing, and each exchange’s unique features—elements that are predominantly found in backend and middleware development, said Pierce Crosby, general manager of TradingView.
“Since the market is moving this fast,” Crosby told Decrypt, snapping his fingers, “what’s the competitive advantage in building charts yourself? Matching engines, multi-chain trading systems, vibrant communities, connecting crypto wallets and liquidity pools—it’s the proprietary things like this that make one exchange actually distinct from another.”
License to innovate
With speed in mind, several years ago TradingView began open-sourcing its frontend development tools to crypto exchanges and industry publications.
Today, more than 500 trading venues, exchanges, and brokerages—including DEXTools, Bitpanda, Kraken, Blockchain.com, Crypto.com, FTX, BitMEX and Bitstamp, as well as aggregators like CoinMarketCap and CoinGeck—use plug-and-play solutions to integrate TradingView’s utility functions into their applications.
Exchanges reskin, reshape, and customize the look and feel of the tech they license from TradingView to make it their own.