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System Design questions require understanding of core concepts and practice. PracHub provides solutions with explanations to help you master system design interviews.

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This is a hard difficulty System Design question, commonly asked during Onsite rounds at Coinbase.

What role is this question designed for?

This question is commonly asked for Software Engineer candidates at Coinbase during technical interviews.

Design a crypto trading platform | Coinbase Interview Question

Quick Overview

This question evaluates a candidate's competence in system design, distributed systems, reliability engineering, and operational concerns such as idempotency, retries, reconciliation, and SLA‑aware API design when integrating with synchronous third‑party HTTP exchange APIs.

System Design: Crypto Trading Platform via Synchronous Third‑Party HTTP APIs

Context

You are designing a trading platform that routes client orders to external cryptocurrency exchanges which expose synchronous HTTP APIs (place/cancel/get). Fills and cancellations occur at the exchanges and must be reflected back to clients reliably and quickly.

Requirements

Design the system and address the following:

Overall architecture
- Services, databases, messaging, and third‑party connectors.
Order lifecycle
- Define the order state machine and transitions.
- How to persist, replay, and recover state after failures/restarts.
Sync vs async
- Why the flow is effectively asynchronous despite using synchronous HTTP.
- How to decouple submission from fills/cancellations.
Third‑party timeouts and failures
- Retries, idempotency, deduplication.
- Circuit breakers, dead‑letter queues, reconciliation.
Traffic spikes
- Rate limiting, backpressure, autoscaling, queueing, batching, hot‑shard mitigation.
Data consistency guarantees
- For orders, trades, and balances.
Client‑facing surface
- APIs, SLAs/SLOs, monitoring/alerting.

Quick Overview

Requirements

Design the system and address the following:

Overall architecture

Services, databases, messaging, and third‑party connectors.

Order lifecycle

Define the order state machine and transitions.
How to persist, replay, and recover state after failures/restarts.

Sync vs async

Why the flow is effectively asynchronous despite using synchronous HTTP.
How to decouple submission from fills/cancellations.

Third‑party timeouts and failures

Retries, idempotency, deduplication.
Circuit breakers, dead‑letter queues, reconciliation.

Traffic spikes

Rate limiting, backpressure, autoscaling, queueing, batching, hot‑shard mitigation.

Data consistency guarantees

For orders, trades, and balances.

Client‑facing surface

APIs, SLAs/SLOs, monitoring/alerting.

Design a crypto trading platform

Quick Overview

System Design: Crypto Trading Platform via Synchronous Third‑Party HTTP APIs

Context

Requirements

Solution

Comments (0)

Design a crypto trading platform

Quick Overview

System Design: Crypto Trading Platform via Synchronous Third‑Party HTTP APIs

Context

Requirements

Solution

Comments (0)