BTC Markets is the largest, most liquid, Australian digital asset exchange.

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Founded in 2013, it is trusted by over 270,000 verified Australian users who have traded over $8.75 billion. They provide real-time, instant AUD deposits and withdrawals, processed 24/7 via the New Payment Platform.

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Want to hear more about how Blockdaemon can help you with your Blockchain journey? Contact us today to chat more about our blockchain solutions, or read on to get a closer look at what’s new.

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Finding the Right Node Infrastructure Partner

Initially BTC Markets was looking for a basic backup transaction processing service for their exchange.

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Being such a prominent exchange, this need quickly grew into needing a secure node infrastructure partner that supported a variety of protocols in various locations. BTC Markets works closely with leading networks and require a High Availability (HA) validating and non-validating nodes with SLAs included to be able to use their depositing system.

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To focus on their user experience and not have their developers tied up with the maintenance and monitoring of nodes, outsourcing the management of node services allowed them to free up valuable time.

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‍"We wanted to partner with the leader in the market for node management and operations and that was Blockdaemon. BTC Markets has over $8.75 billion in trades and 270,000+ users making it imperative to collaborate with a secure, trusted platform.  Since they support 30+ protocols, offer monitoring solutions, and handle node software updates, it saves us time and overhead costs so that we can focus on our customer experience. We look forward to building Australia's digital economy together!" – Caroline Bowler, CEO of BTC Markets

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Building Value with Performance Optimizations

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To mitigate network latency for their connections, BTC Markets needed nodes specifically in Australia.

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Blockdaemon previously did not enable launches in Australia as a default option. However, after a quick update and a series of QA tests to ensure the region itself was as reliable as BTC Markets required, the platform was updated to enable their nodes to launch in Australia. In fact, all users immediately reaped the benefit of this update. Guaranteed uptime, speed, security, and support were important features when choosing a provider. Blockdaemon was able to simplify the process of deploying nodes while making sure their uptime needs were met.

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For individual nodes Blockdaemon provides the up-time of the underlying data-center, in general 99.9%. We also monitor blockchain relevant input such as: CPU load, disk, memory, log files, peer count, and block height.

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Enterprise Grade Security for Preventive Measures

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Security and privacy of BTC Markets clients' accounts and data is top priority.

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They run regular reconciliations of all of their funds (a minimum of once every 30 minutes), apply security best practices, and are continually developing and enhancing their security measures. They also use a cold wallet and hot wallet system to secure and manage their clients' cryptocurrency reserves. By maintaining a full reserve and process reconciliations regularly, clients can feel assured that the funds shown in their accounts match with what is really in BTC Markets bank and cold wallets.

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With BTC Markets encrypted cold wallet storage kept off-site in multiple locations, each location is both physically secure and physically diverse.This was a perfect fit for Blockdaemon's security model. Blockdaemon is internally ISO compliant with enterprise-grade security and backup systems. By default we disable wallet functionality on the node itself and encourage customers to use pre-signed transactions so that we never store private account keys.  

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Blockdaemon also uses standard linux and cloud features for firewalls (iptables, google firewall, AWS security groups) and actively monitor news, Twitter, Github, and similar channels for security warnings. By having these security protocols in place, we are able to effectively mitigate security issues.

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Ongoing Support and Communication

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Communication is key to successful partnerships.

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To coordinate communication surrounding protocol upgrades and infrastructures updates, Blockdaemon set up a shared Slack channel with BTC Markets. This allowed questions to be answered quickly and keep everyone in the loop. Armed with more metrics and a secure middleware provider, BTC Markets has already gained significant insight into their node operations and will be utilizing Blockdaemon for additional node services and protocols.

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To learn more about how Blockdaemon can assist with your node operations, reach out to [email protected].