Coinbase ditched a vendor and built its own risk system. Here’s what that actually means
Coinbase replaces a third-party risk platform with its own STARK system to support 24x7 futures trading and higher volumes.
Coinbase tossed out its old vendor risk platform and built a new in-house system called STARK. The old setup could not keep up. Too many users. Too much trading. And Coinbase wants the lights on all day, every day.
The vendor system kept breaking in the same ways. Risk data arrived in separate messages that did not always match. Servers sat off-premise, which slowed everything down. Weekly maintenance took the system offline. Not great for a futures platform that never sleeps.
STARK works differently. It creates a single snapshot each time something changes in a user’s portfolio. That snapshot contains all the important risk numbers at once, with the inputs attached. No more scattered messages. No more waiting for servers across town.
Coinbase says the speed jump was huge. Data that used to be more than ten seconds old now updates in about ten milliseconds.
The company also redesigned how the system recovers after a failure. STARK logs everything in a Kafka event stream. If something breaks, it rebuilds its state by combining stored snapshots with a replay of events. One backup copy sits idle and can take over immediately. Coinbase says the recovery time dropped from hours to seconds.
They ran STARK quietly in the background for two months. Automated tests checked that every risk trigger matched the old system. It passed 105 scenarios before they switched it on.
According to Coinbase, the migration took under six months and went live in the third quarter of 2024. Since then, data is 400 times fresher. Incidents were cut in half. The platform can finally run 24x7 with higher traffic from institutional traders. And business has grown fast with weekly trades in the millions, a fivefold jump in overall volume and triple the users.
The recap
- Coinbase replaces vendor risk platform with in-house STARK for futures.
- Average data staleness drops from over 10 seconds to 10 milliseconds.
- Migration by Q3 2024 enables 24x7 trading and higher institutional capacity.
