MEMX: Our Connectivity Strategy
We founded Members Exchange in 2019 with the goal of leveraging technology to create a fair and transparent market for all investors, envisioning an innovative market that would lower costs and provide an efficient experience for everyone.
In building our market, we’ve stayed true to these principles, working to design the optimal U.S. equity exchange. We’ve taken lessons learned by our seasoned team, applied modern technologies, and listened to you, the customer, to inform our decisions in building this market. Our connectivity strategy, designed to reduce industry costs, decrease market complexity, and benefit all industry participants, is no exception.
In MEMX’s continuing effort to drive greater transparency, I’m pleased to communicate key elements of our plan.
- The MEMX market is designed for all investors, using innovative technology to lower costs, ensure fair access, and promote transparency.
At MEMX, we believe that technology innovations and upgrades should decrease costs, instead of increasing them. As a result, we are focused on lowering your fees by leveraging modern technologies to meet your current and future performance demands while still providing scale for growth. These are staples of our connectivity – and collective – strategy. - Our connectivity strategy leverages modern technologies that align with current industry needs and is synchronized with infrastructure provider roadmaps.
Leveraging modern technologies means moving away from the decade-old equipment, infrastructure, architecture, and processes in use by much of the industry, which can contribute to performance degradation when handling heavy traffic while also being increasingly expensive to maintain. MEMX will instead use modern technologies and architectures from the mainstream network equipment providers, driven by technology industry leaders such as Amazon, Google, and Microsoft.
Aligning with infrastructure providers will also simplify the adoption of future technology improvements, facilitate the move to high-performance commodity solutions, and stimulate the development of new products and services. Indeed, leveraging modern technologies like 25 Gigabit Ethernet (25GbE) will naturally lead to lower industry costs by significantly increasing density while reducing the physical and power footprint, answering a plea we’ve frequently heard from participants. - As part of that plan, we intend to migrate our market to 25GbE technology, aligning with our mission to provide a fair, transparent and efficient experience for all.
Moving to 25GbE dovetails with infrastructure provider roadmaps and delivers 2.5 times the bandwidth of 10GbE at under 1.5 times the cost. This levels the playing field for all investors by democratizing access and, simply put, allows us to do a heck of a lot more with a whole lot less.
Importantly, this transition will also increase determinism and ensure that customers experience consistent performance on MEMX at all times. This means, of course, that we will continuously adapt to what the industry needs on this front, i.e. once migrated to 25GbE, customers will be able to upgrade to 100GbE, etc. with ease. - The migration to 25GbE will democratize access to state-of-the-art infrastructure and remove unnecessary market friction.
MEMX believes that, as new technologies are introduced, they should be made available to everyone to create a better performing market for all participants, without an associated increase in fees. To this end, using technologies like 25GbE provides higher bandwidth and greater port density while reducing cost and complexity, increasing determinism and lowering latency. - We will begin at 10GbE for direct-connect clients with higher bandwidths available to extranet providers offering hosted solutions.
Technology advancement is inevitable and, in keeping with our connectivity strategy, higher bandwidths like 25GbE will later be available for direct connect clients as we gather data, consult with clients, and continue to innovate around technology. We’re providing higher bandwidths to extranet providers so we can effectively serve a customer segment that has already embraced higher bandwidths and is quickly able to connect.
When we started MEMX we promised simplicity and we aim to honor that commitment with our connectivity strategy. By leveraging modern technologies and listening to our customers, we will continuously adapt to what the industry needs and iterate to maintain a market that truly exists for all investors. Thank you for your great support and we look forward to working with you.