Architecture overview

Plxtra offers technologies to support multiple scenarios, such as running a self-hosted digital exchange, offering brokerage operations over external third-party exchanges, or any combination of both.

This includes:

• An exchange with realtime order execution and matching.
• A registry with accounting of cash and holdings.
• An order management system for routing and vetting.
• A realtime data distribution platform for both market and trading data.
• Three web-facing client applications to build upon.

These are supported by a suite of systems such as cross-application watchlists, auditing and session reporting, holiday tracking, news feeds, and realtime market scanning.

Principles

Plxtra is intended to be modular and customisable, to support as many business scenarios as possible, rather than offering a specific one-size-fits-all solution. No matter how big or small your business is, no matter what systems you need to integrate with, Plxtra has a solution.

• Modular: Components have clearly defined roles and APIs, each focused on its area of expertise.
• Customisable: Plugins are supported where applicable, allowing for easy extensibility and integration.
• Available: Components are designed for scalability and redundancy, from single instances up to large clusters, to support any amount of load and reliability requirements.
• Realtime: Create markets, issue symbols, add accounts and users, trade, and settle, all in realtime. But if you have batch systems, we support those too.
• Retail-focused: From the exchange to your phone and desktop, we provide the components needed to get started.

Plxtra is not a high-frequency trading platform. It is intended for retail systems, optimised for throughput with a large number of customers rather than low latency for one or two.

Not included

Plxtra is intended for use alongside existing industry-standard software relating to customer management and back office, and does not include a production-ready authentication server, or features providing a CRM or back-office. Instead, standard OAuth and OIDC interfaces can be used for authentication, while a suite of REST APIs can be used to manipulate and monitor the platform.