Flowdesk: Building a secure, sustainable future for crypto-financial markets
About Flowdesk
Financial technology company Flowdesk is setting a new standard for market-making and crypto-financial services by delivering a transparent, efficient, and regulated trading infrastructure, as well as a wide range of other digital assets services.
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Contact usFlowdesk deploys its cryptocurrency services platform on Google Cloud to scale easily while keeping financial data secure, leveraging the global network of Google Cloud to keep latencies low.
Google Cloud results
- Speeds up delivery of analytics services to clients with Looker
- Provides a flexible, scalable microservices infrastructure with an improved uptime of up to 99.9%
- Enables multi-region deployment of Google Kubernetes Engine, optimizing platform performance globally
- Delivers secure storage of client cryptocurrency data using Cloud Key Management Service
New client services launched six months ahead of roadmap
As the digital asset market is growing and maturing, crypto issuers' needs are becoming more complex. Achieving sustainable global growth in the increasingly regulated crypto economy is getting more difficult by the day. Market participants require more services and support to scale their activities securely and in a way that complies with international financial regulations.
With a background in the traditional finance sector and a passion for technology, CEO Guilhem Chaumont co-founded Flowdesk in order to help crypto issuers engineer the financial institutions of the future. "The practice of buying and selling assets has been accelerating over the past decades by digitalization," Chaumont says. "Rather than replicating traditional market-making processes, we want to empower crypto issuers and enable them to manage their secondary market sales themselves."
Flowdesk has grown rapidly over the past two years. It is now connected to more than 85 exchanges, and is increasing the number of services it offers. In addition to market-making support, which provides token issuers with the liquidity they need to manage their secondary markets, Flowdesk now offers brokerage, custody, and treasury management services, aiming to become a one-stop partner for its clients. With offices in Paris and Singapore, and another office due to open in the US at the end of 2022, its goal is to provide customers with 24/7 support, 365 days a year.
"Our goal is to bridge traditional finance and crypto finance. We are building a platform for the thousands of token issuers that will enter the space in the next 10 years, and that's why we've chosen a scalable global infrastructure on Google Cloud."
—Guilhem Chaumont, CEO and co-founder, FlowdeskIn order to deliver a low-latency trading infrastructure for its clients, as well as functions such as monitoring dashboards within its self-service platform, Flowdesk decided to switch cloud providers. It chose Google Cloud as the appropriate provider to support its growth globally.
"Our goal is to bridge traditional finance and crypto finance," says Chaumont. "We are building a platform for the thousands of token issuers entering the space in the next 10 years, and that's why we've chosen a scalable global infrastructure on Google Cloud."
Scaling with sustainability in mind
Flowdesk built its initial infrastructure on dedicated servers, writing and running its own scripts, and building its databases itself. As the infrastructure was inflexible and difficult to scale, the team decided to make the switch to a microservices-based infrastructure hosted in the cloud, to resolve issues such as the lack of monitoring, as well as errors leading to service downtime.
Flowdesk tested a number of different cloud providers, but found that Google Cloud was the best fit for its approach, which focused on scalability, security, and sustainability. "The Google Cloud team is very close to our own team in terms of mindset," says Chaumont. "We share an engineering and product-focused culture, and as the Google Cloud team has seen the scale-up trajectory many times before, it offers great support and guidance."
Google Cloud has a sustainable approach to energy, which was also a key consideration for the company. "With recent developments in the cryptocurrency sector such as the switch to a proof-of-stake system, we believe there is huge potential for the industry to reduce its carbon footprint," Chaumont says. "Google Cloud has a commitment to sourcing sustainable energy and reducing the environmental impact of cloud computing, which is a big plus for us."
"Running Kubernetes with other providers convinced us that Google Cloud has the best Kubernetes environment, and that Google Kubernetes Engine is an industry-leading product. It offers the best possible console to help you find the right data in the quickest way."
—Guilhem Chaumont, CEO and co-founder, FlowdeskEnsuring crypto services remain secure
All of Flowdesk's key platform operations now run as microservices orchestrated by Google Kubernetes Engine, with 2,500 microservices covering everything from data processing, to sending orders to exchanges. It also uses Cloud Functions to carry out backend analysis.
"Running Kubernetes with other providers convinced us that Google Cloud has the best Kubernetes environment, and that Google Kubernetes Engine is an industry-leading product," explains Chaumont. "It offers the best possible console to help you find the right data in the quickest way."
As Flowdesk stores extremely sensitive information, including seed phrases which are linked to crypto assets, and API keys for exchanges where client assets are stored, ensuring the security of this data is critical. To do that, Flowdesk leverages Cloud Key Management, which enables API keys to be stored securely, and securely pushed to the microservices infrastructure when needed.
Data crunching and visualization at scale
Flowdesk uses BigQuery to process 5 billion data points from the token exchanges it is connected to every day, as well as executing 2 million orders for its clients and additional activities daily. As it now has a single endpoint for all its data, it no longer needs to worry about the underlying hardware and potential incompatibility of the data, and is able to easily scale up without lengthening processing times when volumes increase.
As part of its roll out of new services to deliver a comprehensive platform for its clients, Flowdesk has integrated BigQuery with Looker to provide reports and visualize business analytics. "In combination with BigQuery, Looker enables us to offer dashboards at scale for our clients without worrying about where the data is stored," says Chaumont. "Thanks to the deployment of Looker, we're six months ahead on our target rollout of new services to clients."
By delivering market and liquidity metrics via Looker, Flowdesk is also able to offer transparency to token issuers and reassure them that it's working in their best interests, as neither Flowdesk nor its employees are allowed to trade clients' tokens. "In the financial sector, trust is not enough, we need to build in legal compliance and transparency," says Chaumont.
"We've managed to scale up while maintaining the same latency times as before, and have also improved our uptime from 99% to 99.9%. On the financial side, the cost per marketing-making feed has been significantly reduced."
—Guilhem Chaumont, CEO and co-founder, FlowdeskGreater reliability, lower costs
One of the key ways that Chaumont measures the success of the implementation is customer satisfaction. But moving its services to Google Cloud has also enabled it to improve infrastructure reliability, as well as controlling costs. "We've managed to scale up while maintaining the same latency times as before, and have also improved our uptime from 99% to 99.9%," he says. "On the financial side, the cost per market-making feed has been significantly reduced."
In the year ahead, Flowdesk plans to continue minimizing latency times by getting as close to exchanges as possible, leveraging Google Cloud's multi-region network. It will also continue to develop new use cases for Looker, ahead of delivering its all-in-one platform by the end of the year.
"As we're scaling fast, our needs are always changing," he says. "With Google Cloud, we know we can easily connect to other software and providers, as well as having an ecosystem of new tools and possibilities to explore. That all adds up to a faster, more resilient platform for our clients, and the ability to deliver new products even quicker."
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
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About Flowdesk
Financial technology company Flowdesk is setting a new standard for market-making and crypto-financial services by delivering a transparent, efficient, and regulated trading infrastructure, as well as a wide range of other digital assets services.