A seasoned Senior Staff Engineer at Bitvavo, the leading crypto exchange in the Benelux, with over two decades in the IT industry. A passionate advocate for technology, distributed systems, and engineering culture, Marcos Maia has built a diverse career spanning multiple countries and roles, from engineering to architecture and consultancy. With a focus on finance, investment, and telecom sectors, he shares his expertise in development practices, low-latency systems, engineering culture, and Apache Kafka through engaging talks for leadership, developers, students, and clients.
Achieving single-digit microsecond latencies in crypto trading isn’t just ambitious—it’s transformative. Founded in 2018 in Amsterdam, Bitvavo has grown into the largest Euro-denominated crypto exchange, setting benchmarks for performance, security, and scalability.
As one of the first exchanges licensed under MiCA, Bitvavo upholds unmatched transparency and trust across Europe. Recently, its engineering team rebuilt the core architecture on JVM technologies, unlocking single-digit microsecond latencies, boosting reliability, and creating a scalable foundation for rapid growth.
Key challenges addressed included ultra-low latency, concurrency, resilience, replayability, auditability, and data integrity. To meet them, Bitvavo applied advanced JVM optimizations: minimized garbage collection, extensive object pooling, efficient IPC via reliable UDP, high-performance ring buffers, and specialized data structures.
High availability was ensured through in-memory replication with hot, warm, and cold standby nodes, delivering near-zero downtime and robust resilience.
This talk offers practical insights into JVM performance tuning, architectural strategies for resilient high-throughput systems, and best practices for high availability—sharing lessons learned, pitfalls to avoid, and actionable guidance for building mission-critical, high-performance applications.
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