How To Transform a 7 Year Old Company in 9 Months

Synthetix is well-known as an OG DeFi protocol originally launched as ‘Haven’ on Ethereum Mainnet in May, 2018.

Since its inception, Synthetix has continually reinvented itself in line with shifting tech and market conditions, including a series of transitions from a stablecoin to early perps/synthetic assets, and leading the DeFi migration to L2s…

But in 2025, we transformed Synthetix into a high-frequency trading platform.

Despite Synthetix being an early innovator in DeFi and synthetic assets, our pioneering spirit faltered somewhere along the way, and naturally, competitors came along and took our lunch money.

Our new CEO, Ben Celermajer joined and set a clear goal: create an incredible, differentiated product experience within a specific domain: perpetual futures. 

A perp DEX can’t run on slow software. We needed sub-100ms latency for order placement, and this requires a colossal amount of backend software. The problem was that Synthetix didn’t really have a “backend” in the traditional sense. There was a frontend and a blockchain, but no APIs, services, databases, or anything…

When I joined as CTO in January 2025, the first order of business was to evaluate the scope of our resources. We had a frontend team that joined us when we acquired Kwenta, but their focus was split across a vast array of different verticals.

We went through a process of sunsetting our old products and building out a new roadmap, with all our collective will bent on a new main product focus: a high-frequency, best-in-class perpetual futures trading platform hosted on the most decentralized and credibly neutral blockchain in the world: Ethereum Mainnet.

As I went through the process of understanding our team’s competencies and designing the technical architecture for the new exchange, it became apparent that The Blockchain™ was not the best technology for doing lots of different things quickly. 

Blockchains are distributed ledgers, and distributed means storing and hauling data across multiple servers. We observed that the most popular exchanges were highly centralized, regardless of whether they claimed to be “decentralized”: the most popular decentralized exchange is currently running its blockchain on its own servers. 

It’s definitely not what anyone could describe as “sufficiently decentralized,” especially when compared to Ethereum. The interesting part was: no one really cared. The simple fact was: they have a super high-performance exchange that’s a pleasure for traders to use, which is what accurately defines “good user experience” in this business.

So… what to do? 

Well, make the decision, for starters. 

We didn’t see the value in running a centralised blockchain, so we elected to run primarily off-chain, which is a very crypto way of saying “a backend”. 

This posed a significant problem: we had zero backend engineers.

I started hiring in earnest in May 2025, when we quickly hired our first backend engineer, and our second backend engineer started in July. We let most of our blockchain engineers go as we sunset our legacy products, so we could focus on the next phase of Synthetix. 

It was a tough call, but it was the right decision for us to allocate all our resources into building the best product to meet market appetite.

As we were building out the trading platform, it quickly became clear that we would need serious infrastructure and SRE talent. Building software that runs on your laptop is cool, but you need to run it on actual servers at some point.

Being a high-frequency trading platform, there are several important things to consider through both the architectural lens and infrastructure lens:

• How big do you want your servers?
• How do you isolate services with different scaling or performance requirements independently? 
• What security model do you want to use? 
• How do you protect from DDoS, DoS, and other attacks?
• How do you isolate environments from each other securely and conveniently? 
• How long will it take us to hire a team that can not just do the low-level technical design, but implement a system that accounts for all these requirements?

At this point in time, there were three people at the Synthetix headquarters with the requisite infrastructure experience, but we all had existing jobs. We needed serious cloud infrastructure talent. 

This is where AWS provided excellent high-level guidance, directing us to existing architectural and design playbooks and supporting us with their Solutions Architects, who helped steer us through the early shaping of the technology platform. 

DataDog was also fantastic at helping us set up observability for the distributed system we were building.

The vendor support was great, but we still had to find the capacity within our existing team to implement what we agreed with these partners. What we really needed was a partner who could actually implement a world-class high-frequency trading platform, with a focus on scale, performance, and security.

I asked AWS for their recommended partners, and they introduced us to PurePlay Cloud, whom I met and provided a brief.

PurePlay came back quickly with a Statement of Work that described exactly what we wanted, with the right amount of detail. 

The SoW highlighted the exact set of steps needed to achieve our goals, resulting in an intense project on aggressive, borderline unreasonable timelines. We agreed on a deal and got moving within the fortnight.

For the next few months, PurePlay brought top talent to bear and completed the infrastructure security upgrades on schedule. We successfully launched the Synthetix trading platform in November 2025 and have been operating happily since. 

This is the benefit of leveraging consulting partners: businesses like PurePlay can rapidly understand, guide, and deliver a functional infrastructure project at lightning speed. We often hear lamentations about bloated consulting projects. Still, if you find a provider that can demonstrate early that they deeply understand your problem and can deploy talent that can move fast within your organization, they can greatly accelerate time to market.

We’re past the initial hurdle of launching, but we know we’ll need more help as we scale in the future. We want to maintain a lean team that can shape projects in a manner well-suited to consulting partners, so we will use them more in the future.