Frequently asked questions

Voltnir is EPEX SPOT M7 intraday trading middleware for power desks. It is a self-hosted gateway that connects your desk to the EPEX SPOT intraday continuous market and exposes it over REST, WebSocket and gRPC, maintaining the order book, validating orders, and tracking position, cash and P&L in real time.

The EPEX SPOT intraday continuous market on the M7 trading system, and nothing else. You configure the delivery areas your EPEX SPOT membership is admitted to, by EIC code, and the M7 products you want; Voltnir maintains the book and risk for exactly that set. Contract granularity follows M7, hourly through quarter-hourly.

No. Voltnir is the market-access layer, not the brain. It owns the exchange connection, the order book, validation, risk checks and audit, and executes the orders you send. Your models, signals and forecasts never enter it. And it trades the EPEX SPOT intraday continuous market only; day-ahead and auction trading run on a different EPEX SPOT system and are out of scope.

Self-hosted. Voltnir runs in your environment, not ours: a single static binary on your own infrastructure, with your EPEX SPOT credentials and your trading data staying on your side. There is no Voltnir-operated cloud in the trading path.

A Linux host you control, your EPEX SPOT credentials, and a licence file from the customer portal. Voltnir ships as one static binary with an embedded database, so there is nothing else to install; point it at your own PostgreSQL instead when you want an external store. The connection to EPEX SPOT is outbound only; you open nothing inbound toward the exchange.

Three transports over one contract: a REST API, a WebSocket feed, and gRPC. Every unary trading operation is available on all three with the same fields, permissions and units, and live contracts, orders, trades and P&L stream over both WebSocket and gRPC.

Over whichever transport fits your stack: REST, WebSocket or gRPC. Every operation is available on all three with identical fields, units and permissions. There is also a first-party Python SDK and the published service definition for generated clients in other languages. The bundled trading terminal is built on the same public API, so anything it shows, your own code can read the same way.

The full M7 order-entry model: regular limit, iceberg, market, balance and block orders, including user-defined blocks, together with the M7 execution restrictions (AON, FOK, IOC) and validity rules. Every order is validated as one combination before anything reaches the exchange, with the same fields and the same rules on REST, WebSocket and gRPC.

Layered pre-trade checks enforced in the gateway before any order reaches M7: a house-wide position limit plus independent per-member limits, cash limits in separate EUR and GBP pools built to the ECC risk methodology and fail-closed by default (an unset limit means no trading, not unlimited trading), self-trade prevention, and a global kill-switch that halts order entry live, with no restart. Every limit change is permission-gated and lands in the audit trail.

Yes. An append-only trail of every state-changing action, stamped with who did it, from where, over which transport, and the exact before and after of what changed. Orders, trades and every fault the exchange returns are recorded with per-user attribution, and all of it is queryable and exportable on every transport, with retention you choose.

Yes. The binary serves a React trading terminal built on the exact public API any client uses: live order-book depth, an order ticket with a pre-trade market-impact preview, the public trade tape, real-time P&L, a cross-border capacity map of Europe, and the operator pages for users, members and limits.

Voltnir does not publish a headline latency figure, because the number that matters is the one your own deployment measures. The gateway times itself continuously and reports those measurements over its own API and in the terminal status bar, so you read latency from your install and your network path, not from a datasheet.

Yes. Voltnir is multi-tenant and white-label: one EPEX SPOT membership can carry multiple desks, each with its own users, per-member limits and role-based access control, isolated position and cash tracking, and an append-only audit trail.

Against a signed licence file the binary verifies at startup, offline. There is no licence server to call and nothing phones home. The licence fixes the environment it may reach (a simulator licence can never trade production), the EPEX SPOT identity it may trade as, the tier it runs at (Trader, or Desk with user and member management), and the date it expires. Renewing is a new file and a restart.

Download a free simulator license from the customer portal and run Voltnir against the EPEX SPOT SIM environment in minutes, with no sales call. The Voltnir simulator license is free; the one thing you need from EPEX SPOT itself is their simulation license, the ASIM license, which issues the SIM credentials Voltnir connects with.