Connamara Technologies just took home the award for “Most Innovative Use of Open Source/Cloud Technology” at the 2026 A-Team Innovation Awards.
In less than a decade, using open source to build exchange platforms and to host the exchange in a public cloud has not only gained widespread acceptance but has become the de facto way to build an exchange.
The distinct advantages of these technologies have become evident to new exchange innovators for at least a decade. Now, established exchanges are beginning to recognize the competitive disadvantage of not leveraging them.
Ten years ago, innovators looking to bring a new exchange-traded product to market faced significant upfront costs: both to build the software and to invest in the hardware infrastructure required to operate the exchange. The first risk taken was the task of scoping the data center build. If they believed in the market’s potential, they often overinvested in hardware and networking beyond what was needed at launch; a classic “build it and they will come” approach. The alternative was to build only the minimum required hardware and networking to conserve capital. The risk, ironically, was success. If the exchange took off, the infrastructure might not scale quickly enough to capture the opportunity.
When building software, two options stood before the innovator: a from-scratch exchange platform build that added on expensively licensed vended solutions of major infrastructure components (such as databases, messaging buses). Or spend years building these components in-house, substantially delaying time to market.
Thus, EP3 was designed to address these two monumental challenges faced by innovators. By leveraging open source software, EP3 offers a lower total cost to our customers than our competitors, who either have built all their applications from scratch or leveraged third-party vended solutions with their expensive license fees.
By designing EP3 to operate in the cloud and leveraging open-source containerization and orchestration technologies, we’ve diminished many of the risks associated with hardware and networking buildouts. Exchange infrastructure can now scale in line with actual growth, rather than speculative demand.
This wasn’t a recent shift – it was a deliberate design decision made over a decade ago in response to where the market was heading. As early as 2015, our first company, Connamara Systems, was helping CFTC DCM applicants build exchanges in the cloud.
Lowering the barrier to entry for innovators launching new markets has been the most positive feedback we’ve received from our diverse slate of trusted customers.
Thank you to the independent, expert advisory board that worked in collaboration with A-Team’s editorial team to select us, and congratulations to all the nominees in our category.
