Trading Terminal

A multi-asset trading terminal rebuilt from the kernel up — Rust execution layer, WebGL rendering, sub-millisecond order paths. Replaced an eight-year legacy stack in nineteen weeks.

The state of play.

The firm's traders were running an eight-year-old terminal that had quietly become the biggest operational risk on the floor. P99 latency on the order path had drifted past 240ms, the WebGL price ladder skipped frames under load, and any change to the rendering layer triggered a week of regression testing across desks.

What we built.

We rewrote the execution layer in Rust against an explicit microsecond budget on every hot path. The price ladder moved to a custom WebGL renderer with a deterministic frame loop. We kept Postgres for orders and built a Kafka spine for fills, then ran the new and legacy terminals side by side for six weeks before any desk cut over.

What shipped.

Nineteen weeks from kickoff to first desk in production. Eighteen months later, zero outages, a 94 percent reduction in P99 order-path latency, and a terminal the trading floor argues over the way they used to argue over chairs.

Virtual Franciscans is the only outside team we have worked with where the engineering felt indistinguishable from our best internal hires.