Design a crypto trading platform

Q: Design a crypto trading platform

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.

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Question

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.

Design a crypto trading platform

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

Context

Requirements

Solution

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