Order Routing

An order routing protocol needs at least some of the flexibility of FIX to be widely applicable, and it also needs to be extensible. The FIX protocol can be encoded, as is, on Blink in an interoperable way by applying the FIX/Blink Specification. Doing so makes FIX go faster but not competitively so, until the FIX session and application layers are reformed.

Pantor has implemented a lean order routing protocol over Blink and UDP in the Ordo platform.

Market Data

Existing low and medium volume FIX-based market data flows can be encoded in Blink and gain higher performance and better bandwidth utilization.

High-volume flows put a demand on session and application layers to be lean.

FAST works by eliminating redundancy using templates, post fact, and the end result is very lean from a bandwidth and processing perspective.

Blink instead offers a compact encoding and a flexible method for defining expressive messages that have little information redundancy to begin with. Blink is suitable for high-volume flows, as a software codec can process more than ten million messages per second on a single core.

Application Protocols

Protocols can be categorized in tiers. There are widely adopted, standardized, first tier protocols such as FIX. Less adopted external protocols form a larger second tier. These can be proprietary or open. A huge third tier comprises internal, in-house application protocols.

Protocol developers most often cannot afford to invent from scratch. Existing flexible alternatives to build upon sacrifice performance. Blink offers the same or better flexibility with the efficiency of a static homegrown protocol. For Blink to become usable, it must first be implemented with relevant programming language bindings.

Migration of Legacy Applications

There is a large population of proprietary system-to-system interfaces that have been developed over a long period of time within large financial institutions. These interfaces need to be replaced or refactored as data volumes increase, and as systems are being enhanced or replaced. Blink offers an efficient alternative.

Constrained Environments

Blink is highly suitable for use in energy-constrained devices and wireless networks. In this scenario, the capacity for very high message rates among servers is traded for power savings. A protocol defined on top of Blink in an expressive way makes efficient use of bandwidth thanks to variable-length encoding.

Blink allows complex message structure to be defined easily and processed efficiently.