Throughout history, speed has been a decisive factor in determining the success of trading firms, while technology has been a decisive factor in determining speed. As latency has gone from being measured in milliseconds to microseconds to nanoseconds, whole segments of the financial ecosystem have been built solely on the ability to shave a few miniscule fractions of a second off trade times.
So, as crypto trading takes off, it would be natural to assume that speed would play a similar role.
Yet crypto has some unique features that can dull the impact speed normally has. For high-performance trading firms, success is likely to be based much more on how smart their order routing systems are than how fast they are. The problem is, its easy to conflate speed with smartness because smart order routing historically has been all about just knowing where the best prices are, and that often….
