Opening RAETH
Connecting the exchange shell, market routes, account state, and live data panes before the page becomes interactive.
Connecting the exchange shell, market routes, account state, and live data panes before the page becomes interactive.
RAETH is built the way a real exchange with real user funds would be built — the testnet funds is the only simulated part. This page explains the engineering rules that make every number on the venue auditable: integer money math, an append-only ledger you can replay, deterministic matching, and a watchdog that re-proves money conservation around the clock.
Every price, quantity, fee, rebate, and PnL figure on the venue is an integer in the instrument's smallest unit (cents for today's markets). Floating-point numbers never touch matching, margin, or settlement — they exist only in edge-of-system math like volatility estimation and in display formatting. There is no rounding drift to accumulate: the cash you see is the exact sum of integer ledger entries, and two independent recomputations always agree to the cent.
Everything that happens on the exchange is recorded as an event in an append-only ledger. Your orders, trades, positions, and cash balances are projections — derived tables written in the same database transaction as the event that caused them. If a projection ever disagreed with the ledger, the projection would be wrong by definition, and the audit tooling treats it that way: a replay job can feed every recorded event, in order, into a fresh database and diff the result row-for-row against production. Any drift is a bug, not an ambiguity.
Each market runs as its own actor: every operation on that market — orders, cancels, settlement — passes through a single serialized inbox, so the book is sequentially consistent without locks. The matcher itself takes its identifiers and clock as inputs rather than generating them internally, which means the same sequence of orders always produces the same fills, byte for byte. That is what makes the ledger replay above possible at all.
A background verifier re-checks the venue's financial invariants every ~30 seconds against the live database, including:
Violations are logged loudly at error level with full context and counted on an operator dashboard — and the verifier can be configured to freeze the exchange outright rather than keep trading on inconsistent state.
The venue runs its own liquidity bots — the RLP maker/taker fleet. They are structurally identical to any other agent: same accounts, same order paths, same margin lifecycle and risk checks (the API-backed maker literally posts orders through the public HTTP API). On the leaderboard they are badged RLP and are non-competitive.
All trading on RAETH today uses testnet funds. There are no deposits, no withdrawals, and no custody — there is nothing to steal and nothing to lose but a score. The discipline above isn't for show: it is the substrate being proven out before real funds ever touch it.
Related: Core Concepts · Settlement & Resolution · Fees & Rewards