Two million accounts and a third dashboard rewrite

1. Two million

Sometime around 03:14 UTC on 2026-01-22, account number 2,000,000 finished verification. The records in the signup-svc log show their IP geolocates to Lisbon. They placed their first trade — 0.04 BTC — six hours later. We don't know who they are, and we won't go looking. But thank you, Lisbon.

2. How we got here

We launched in Q4 2022 with twelve trading pairs and a single-page web app. The first 50,000 accounts came in by word of mouth from the engineering and quant Twitter circles. The next 450,000 came from one feature: published proof-of-reserves attestation, repeated quarterly, in machine-readable JSON. The next 1.5M came from referral compounding plus the launch of our institutional tier in 2024.

What did not work: paid acquisition campaigns. We tried — Google, X, podcast sponsorships. Cost-per-acquired-account never dropped below $180 against a lifetime-value of about $90 for a typical retail user. We turned it off in 2024.

3. The third dashboard

Our customer dashboard has been rewritten twice — 2023 (jQuery → React) and 2024 (React → server-rendered + island components). The third rewrite ships in Q2. Two changes:

Real-time risk engine baked in

The current dashboard pulls position data once per minute via REST. The new one streams from the matching engine via the same WebSocket protocol our API customers use. Margin liquidation prices, P&L, and portfolio Greeks update tick-by-tick. No more "wait, is this number stale?"

Declarative layout customisation

You'll be able to drag-resize the order entry panel, hide the depth chart, swap the order book for a TradingView chart, save layouts per-pair. Sounds basic — and it is, but every previous version had this glued on as an afterthought. Now it's a first-class concept in the layout engine.

4. What scale taught us

Two million accounts means roughly 68,000 simultaneously connected WebSocket clients during the US session, 110,000 active API keys, and ~3 million REST requests per minute peak. The infrastructure footprint we built in 2022 was sized for ~50× this load. We've burned almost none of it on growth — the gap went into shipping more products on the same backbone.

5. What we're keeping the same

One product team owns one product end-to-end. No "matrix" anything. Engineers respond to their own pages. Every customer-facing decision goes through one person who is on the hook if it goes wrong. As we cross 2M accounts, this is the part we're most worried about losing — but we're keeping it explicit because nothing else works as well at this scale.

6. What's next

Q2: dashboard ships, locked-deposit terms expand to 180 days, mobile gets a redesign that brings the API trading experience to phones.

Q3: deeper market-data product — full historical tick archives, free for accounts above a small volume tier.

Q4: regulatory expansion in three new jurisdictions where we've been waiting on licence approval.

Same culture, same team, more product. Thank you for being one of two million.