Bitfinex has announced the launch of Shimmer, a proprietary surveillance tool designed to combat market abuse in order to promote legitimate trading.
The name comes from the term used to describe the way a bee defends its hive; it is a market warning and reporting tool that will identify possible manipulative behaviour and suspicious trading activities on the exchange, allowing for investigation in order to improve its integrity.
Shimmer will alert the exchange team about events considered to be potentially improper trading activities on all pairs, including futures and margin trading, like for example suspicious trading patterns.
In addition, this tool will also help combat abusive practices such as money laundering through trading, buying and selling with the intent to manipulate the market or fake orders aimed at forging market supply or demand data.
Shimmer, written in the Rust programming language, is designed to work with Bitfinex’s trading engine, Hive, and builds on the experience already gained by the team since 2012 in terms of market surveillance and trading on the platform.
This initiative aims to make the exchange increasingly attractive for large institutional investors, and for professional investors with sophisticated needs.
The CTO of Bitfinex, Paolo Ardoino, commented:
“Comprehensive market and trade surveillance capabilities are integral to operating a leading cryptocurrency exchange. To meet the complex needs of an evolving digital asset class and to protect our sophisticated participants, Bitfinex has chosen to develop its own state-of-the-art surveillance system. This will help to assure that potentially manipulative practices are rooted out and suspicious behaviour detected. This tool is especially relevant for our futures and margin funding products. We chose to use the Rust programming language for its execution speed and programming safety. The Rust package manager and ecosystem allowed us to be up and running with a workable market detection tool in a short time frame”.
