Binance back in business after successfully completing its largest platform update ever

The latest update introduces a complete overhaul of the crypto exchange’s matching engine

Binance, a Malta-based cryptocurrency exchange and one of the largest in the world, is now back up and running after performing a complete overhaul on its matching engine.

The update was announced on the company’s website earlier this week, when Binance informed users that it would be upgrading its spot trading platform on June 28. The upgrade was initially supposed to take two hours, during which time a wide range of platform features were unavailable, such as deposits, withdrawals, spot trading and P2P trading.

The upgrade had to be extended past the initial projected two hours, but was successfully implemented early this morning.

Since the company’s launch in 2017, Binance has gone through a wide range of system upgrades. Many of these updates were small tweaks to improve the platform’s performance, while others were more noticeable.

In 2019, Binance launched its futures products and margin trading features, followed by lending products and cryptocurrency staking features soon after. The exchange also introduced options on its futures trading platform back in April this year.

While these developments can already be considered major updates, the CEO of Binance, Changpeng Zhao, claims that this most recent upgrade is the company’s largest by far. The new update features a completely overhauled matching engine written out in a purpose-built programming language. According to Zhao, this took over two years to develop.

Further details on the exact features that were changed and its impact on the future of the exchange remains scant. Zhao claims that this new upgrade is a part of the company’s plans to ready the platform for the “next wave.”

When Binance was first launched, it was equipped with what many believed to be the fastest matching engine in the business, capable of sustaining over 1.4 million orders per second.

However, the dramatic increase in both active users — as well as the number of markets in the last three years — have led to incidents where the exchange has struggled with processing information, causing significant issues for users during critical market periods.

While Binance remains tight-lipped on the exact futures regarding performance improvements, Zhao revealed on Twitter that the new update offers around ten times the performance over the old matching engine while stating that in theory, the exchange could handle a hundred times more volume but needed to be mindful of getting bottlenecked by other systems.