I know DEV.to is more of a place for backend insights, performance tricks and architectural rants than trading talk. But today, I want to raise something that cuts across what you build - and what we trade on.
So it's latency that connects our 2 worlds. Latency, that decides whether an API call hits the engine in 5 ms or 15 ms - and whether that's fast enough to be profitable.
In trading, outcomes are not only determined by the correctness of the strategy, but by the timing of its execution. An algorithm can be brilliantly designed - but if it acts too slowly, the price it was targeting may no longer exist. Take arbitrage as an example: when you spot a price difference between two exchanges, you're definitely not alone. Other systems are seeing it too - but the profit goes to the one whose order reaches the book first, not the one who noticed it.
Gate.io and WhiteBIT, for instance, report API response times as low as 5 milliseconds. KuCoin offers around 15! The number may seem small, but in a market where price ticks change multiple times per second, those milliseconds are the entire window.
In trading systems, latency is a barrier to participation. It separates those who capture value from those who unintentionally provide it. If your bot sends an order and it reaches the matching engine even slightly behind the rest - you're not just slow, you're literally the reason someone else made a profit.
In that sense, latency becomes more than a technical concern - it becomes part of the economic fabric.
Even if you don't trade, if you're building bots, dashboards, aggregators or backends that interact with exchanges - latency affects what your code can do and how effectively it can do it. A 5 ms head start might not feel like much, but in a system where everyone is competing in real time, it's often enough to define who gets filled - and who fills someone else’s order.
It's an observable reality across CEX APIs, DeFi pools and even cross-chain arbitrage bridges.
The full piece from CoinMarketCap includes more context on exchange API speeds, real arbitrage examples, and how latency behaves like a hidden layer of market logic.
