The Fintech revolution spawned by alternative payment mechanisms and the creation of cryptocurrencies and Initial Coin Offerings (“ICO”) has produced a proliferation of new web-based systems. Firms attempted to bridge the gap with REST APIs that software developers are familiar with, but a synchronous request/response architectural style is a poor fit for bidirectional communications needed for trading. Therefore, cryptocurrency venues are beginning to offer WebSocket-based APIs instead of RESTful, which provides the asynchronous messaging required for trading. However, the messaging semantics are different from one venue to another.
The FIX whitepaper, written by Don Mendelson, FIX Technical Architect and Co-chair of the FIX Orchestra Subgroup, addresses this challenge and details key use cases that demonstrate how FIX can be readily brought into the modern Web technology stack without sacrificing latency or high transaction rates. It also looks at the evolution of the FIX Protocol stack and the future of FIX on the web.
While organisations can now improve the performance of message delivery over the web using FIX, as demonstrated in the whitepaper, the protocol itself has not changed meaning members can continue to use FIX in the same way as before. By using the FIX Protocol stack, however, more and more members will see the business benefits from choosing High-Performance FIX. FIX Trading Community would be delighted to hear from members using it, and those thinking about adopting the FIX Protocol stack.
The High-Performance FIX for the Web Era Whitepaper can be found here (https://www.fixtrading.org/packages/white-paper-high-performance-fix-for-the-web-era/).
If you are interested in learning more about the FIX Protocol Stack and how to adopt the web based High-Performance protocol, please visit: https://github.com/FIXTradingCommunity/conga
For any other questions please contact FIX Trading Community Program Office at fix@fixtrading.org