I work in a vanilla MM space and have had limited exposure to systems/technical side in the crypto space, would love to see the weird/cute crypto-specific problems that exist.
For instance I was surprised to learn the other day that FPGAs are becoming standardized in the crypto space now as well, since to my knowledge network bottlenecks are more difficult to be precise about due to the common usage of websockets, the non-standardized colocation services offered, etc. But what crypto MMs are using FPGAs for, is to do actual JSON (maybe it's FIX by now?) parsing since that became a common bottleneck due to the lack of binary protocols from crypto exchanges.
That's very interesting! I myself have not worked as a MM before so I don't know much about it. I can imagine it is possible since these days there is a lot of cross pollination between traditional finance and crypto. Most exchanges will do Json, though I know of several who have FIX interfaces also.
For instance I was surprised to learn the other day that FPGAs are becoming standardized in the crypto space now as well, since to my knowledge network bottlenecks are more difficult to be precise about due to the common usage of websockets, the non-standardized colocation services offered, etc. But what crypto MMs are using FPGAs for, is to do actual JSON (maybe it's FIX by now?) parsing since that became a common bottleneck due to the lack of binary protocols from crypto exchanges.