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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.

What difficulty level is this interview question?

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 crypto trading system | Coinbase Interview Question

Quick Overview

This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design a trading gateway that reconciles synchronous client APIs with asynchronous downstream exchange behavior, emphasizing distributed systems concepts such as state machines, correctness under failure, idempotency, and scalable traffic handling.

System Design: Crypto Trading Gateway via Logically Asynchronous, Synchronous APIs

Context

You are designing a trading gateway that brokers client orders to multiple third-party crypto exchanges. The external exchanges expose synchronous HTTP endpoints for order submission/cancel (request–response), but trade execution and order updates are delivered asynchronously (e.g., via WebSocket streams or polling). The system must present a clean client-facing API, ensure correctness under failures, and scale through volatile, spiky market conditions.

Requirements

Design the system and cover:

High-level architecture and request flow for placing and canceling orders using a synchronous client API while handling asynchronous downstream behavior.
A complete order state machine and state-transition diagram (e.g., NEW → PARTIALLY_FILLED → FILLED / CANCELED / EXPIRED), including intermediate and failure states.
How to detect and recover from third-party exchange timeouts or failures, including idempotency, retries, reconciliation, and circuit breaking.
Strategies to handle spiky traffic and protect downstream dependencies (queueing, autoscaling, back-pressure, prioritization, rate limiting).

Quick Overview

Context

Requirements

Design the system and cover:

High-level architecture and request flow for placing and canceling orders using a synchronous client API while handling asynchronous downstream behavior.

A complete order state machine and state-transition diagram (e.g., NEW → PARTIALLY_FILLED → FILLED / CANCELED / EXPIRED), including intermediate and failure states.

How to detect and recover from third-party exchange timeouts or failures, including idempotency, retries, reconciliation, and circuit breaking.

Strategies to handle spiky traffic and protect downstream dependencies (queueing, autoscaling, back-pressure, prioritization, rate limiting).

Design crypto trading system

Quick Overview

System Design: Crypto Trading Gateway via Logically Asynchronous, Synchronous APIs

Context

Requirements

Solution

Comments (0)

Design crypto trading system

Quick Overview

System Design: Crypto Trading Gateway via Logically Asynchronous, Synchronous APIs

Context

Requirements

Solution

Comments (0)