Blockchain architecture next to trading systems

Keep responsibilities clear

Mixing trading logic, custody, and settlement paths in one place makes it hard to reason about risk. Keep order routing, balance checks, and signing flows separated so failures are contained and audit trails stay readable.

Interfaces between systems should be boring: typed messages, retries, and metrics by default. This is how you avoid a contract or node change taking down unrelated trading paths.

Decide what belongs on-chain and off-chain

Push the parts that need transparency or shared state to the chain, and keep latency-sensitive or proprietary logic off-chain. This avoids slow paths in execution engines and keeps research code flexible while settlement stays verifiable.

Document these choices. Teams change, and you want the next engineer to know why a module is on-chain or handled by a service.

Logs, metrics and reconciliation

Treat node calls, signer actions, and exchange events like any other production dependency: log them, measure them, and reconcile state regularly. Reconciliation scripts catch drift between ledgers, custody systems, and order states before a client does.