Why Voltnir runs on your infrastructure

Over the last few years, a wave of energy trading software has launched as cloud SaaS. The reasons are easy to understand. Investors like recurring revenue, and "cloud-native" is an easy story to sell. The vendors pitched elasticity and zero maintenance to utilities and trading desks.

What most of them did not think through is what a trading gateway actually has to do.

Latency is measured in hops

In continuous intraday trading, the path between your algorithm and the exchange is part of your strategy. Every network hop adds latency and adds a point where things can go wrong.

A cloud-hosted gateway puts at least one extra network boundary between your trading logic and the exchange. Your order leaves your network, crosses the internet to the vendor's cloud region, gets processed on shared infrastructure, and only then moves on to EPEX SPOT. When that path has a bad moment, such as a routing issue, a noisy neighbor, or a cross-region spike, your order misses gate closure on a quarter-hour product. You're left with an open position, or you missed the trade.

Voltnir's own part of the path is short. On an 8-core CPU, an order goes from arriving at Voltnir to being published on M7 in 118 μs on average, including the pre-trade risk check. On a 2 vCPU VM, the smallest machine we tested, it takes 480 μs. Even the cheapest box stays under half a millisecond.

A round trip across the internet to a cloud region takes several milliseconds at best, often tens, and it varies. Even the best case is about a hundred times slower than everything happening inside the gateway.

Voltnir runs inside your network, next to your own systems. The hop between your algorithm and the gateway is one you control, monitor, and can optimize.

Security teams have to say yes

Anyone who has sold software to a utility or a grid-connected trading desk knows that the CISO decides whether a product gets deployed.

Ask a security team to route production order execution through a multi-tenant cloud platform and you are asking them to accept a lot. Credentials to the exchange live on someone else's servers. Order flow passes through infrastructure shared with other customers. A single vulnerability in the vendor's platform could expose every client at once. Many security teams will say no to that, and they are right to.

Voltnir removes the question. Your exchange credentials, your order flow, and your trading data never leave your environment.

Zero telemetry

Voltnir does not phone home. There is no usage tracking, no analytics beacon, no remote kill switch. The software does not need an outbound connection to anything except the exchange you point it at.

Your security team can verify this by watching the network traffic. You don't need to take our word for it.

One binary

Voltnir ships as a single statically-linked Rust binary. It has no runtime dependencies, no container orchestration requirement, and no stack of services to keep in sync. It exposes REST, WebSocket, and gRPC interfaces and includes a built-in trading terminal.

You deploy it the way you deploy the rest of your critical systems: on your hardware or your private cloud, under your change management, with your monitoring and your backups. Upgrades happen when you decide, after you have tested them.

Why we built it this way

Our view is simple. Trading desks and utilities already have infrastructure teams that run mission-critical systems every day. They don't need a vendor to take that job away from them. They need software that fits into what they already run, performs predictably, and stays out of the way.

That is what Voltnir is built to be.