Introducing CROSSx 2.0

Crossover’s CROSSx ECN entered the spot cryptocurrency marketplace in 2023 as the industry’s first ECN and first-ever execution-only trading venue. Since then, CROSSx has emerged as the most advanced trading venue in the marketplace with infinite private rooms and trailblazing execution speed. Today, CROSSx deploys 1,151 independent fix sessions in production, and matches trades in single digit microseconds.

Now, Crossover has further distanced itself from the pack with the launch of CROSSx 2.0, a monumental upgrade in our underlying system architecture that paves the way to support the growing institutional demand for a primary marketplace that is, in fact, execution-only. In our blog today, we examine the many benefits of CROSSx 2.0.

Executive Summary from Crossover’s CTO

CROSSx 2.0, known as “Pulsar,” is a C++ architectural approach for building high-performance, event-driven systems, refined through decades of real-world trading system development. It is built on the state-of-the-art Corpus C++ framework, inheriting its proven design philosophy and robust implementation patterns. Pulsar 2.0 enforces strict separation of concerns, strong typing, and compile-time validation—catching errors early and ensuring system reliability. Solutions are assembled from pluggable, self-contained components that integrate seamlessly, enabling rapid evolution, technology flexibility, and minimal disruption to existing logic. With operational capabilities embedded from the outset—monitoring, configuration, logging, and live command execution—Pulsar 2.0 delivers production-ready, low-latency, high-throughput systems designed for demanding domains.

Business Benefits

• Faster Development & Lower Risk – Strongly typed, compile-time-validated components and standardized interaction patterns prevent defects before they reach production.
• High Modularity & Extensibility – Pluggable building blocks enable rapid feature deployment, upgrades, and custom integrations with minimal code impact.
• Operational Readiness by Design – Integrated monitoring, configuration, logging, and runtime control ensure deployment-ready systems from day one.
• Performance & Reliability – Precision core management, optimized event orchestration, and efficient serialization deliver consistent low-latency, high-throughput performance.
• Future-Proof Adaptability – Flexible serialization formats, swappable messaging layers, and protocol-agnostic design make it easy to adopt emerging technologies.

Architectural Principles

1. Strict Separation of Concerns – Immutable architectural units isolate business logic from infrastructure, clearly defining both responsibilities and non-responsibilities.
2. Component-Oriented Composition – Systems are assembled from independent components whose dependencies and interactions are orchestrated without constraining their nature.
3. Strong Typing & Compile-Time Guarantees – Template metaprogramming and code generation enforce type safety, eliminate invalid operations, and ensure predictable behavior.
4. Behavior-Free Data Objects – Standardized containers and fields provide structural consistency, enabling uniform validation, transformation, and serialization without embedded logic.
5. Pluggable Infrastructure – Messaging, monitoring, core allocation, and configuration subsystems use interchangeable providers, enabling technology swaps without architectural change.
6. Embedded Operational Capabilities – Metrics, logging, configuration, and live commands are part of the core design, not retrofitted features.
7. Sequencer-Inspired Architecture – Ensures coordinated, orderly, and efficient execution of distributed tasks.

Immediate Business Impact

CROSSx 2.0 provides the necessary capacity & scalability to allow for a steady state of system releases intraweek, which in turn allows Crossover to continually upgrade CROSSx at an unrivaled pace. Benefits of CROSSx 2.0 will not only continue indefinitely but CROSSx participants already receive tangible benefits right from the start.

The immediate benefits of CROSSx 2.0 are a collection of new order types and advanced BBO & Smart Order Matching (SOM) functionality. Please see below for a description of some of the details related to both areas.

Order Types

• POST- ONLY Orders – Limit orders that add liquidity to the CROSSx order book and do not match with an existing quote or order already in the book. The post-only order type will only ever add liquidity to the book, never take liquidity from the book.
• PEG Orders – Dynamic limit orders that track a reference price (such as the midpoint or primary side of the market based on BBO values), enabling passive execution while optimizing price placement relative to market movements.
• ICEBERG Orders – A specialized order type used to conceal large orders from the market by displaying only a small portion of the order’s total size. This order aims to mitigate market impact and allow traders to execute large trades without significantly affecting the market price.

BBO & SMART ORDER MATCHING (SOM)

As a reminder, every taker of liquidity on CROSSx receives their own market data and bespoke liquidity pool. CROSSx is built with the capacity to scale private rooms exponentially. The CROSSx BBO considers price, size, and time. CROSSx market data examines the totality of pricing across the CROSSx book, whereas individual clients experience their own, individual order books. Participants on CROSSx can use various order types to either aggress their own market data or passively work their order across all other liquidity sources, including additional takers across the platform. When dealing on the primary CROSSx offering, all trade executions are anonymous, such that the maker and taker do not know one another.

When determining order routing, CROSSx deploys a proprietary SOM that considers the behavioral characteristics of all liquidity providers in total or within a given private room. For example, CROSSx may examine characteristics such as fill ratios, response times, and market impact, to best route orders based on the true price provided from various liquidity sources. CROSSx ranks all liquidity sources in real-time upon the execution of each trade. The depth of complexity within the CROSSx SOM is a primary component that allows for the eradication or reduction in market impact as well as the collapsing of spreads.