The Challenge: Why Most Funds Struggle With Execution Infrastructure

Running a liquid crypto fund means dealing with problems that traditional finance solved decades ago, in a market that never closes, across exchanges with inconsistent APIs, and with assets that can move 10% while you are still debugging a connection timeout.

New funds launching today face a choice. Build this infrastructure themselves, or work with a partner who has already solved it. Here is what building it yourself usually involves.

Fragmented infrastructure. Every exchange has its own API, authentication scheme, rate limits, and quirks. Binance handles orders differently than Bybit, which handles them differently than Gate.io. A fund trading across several venues ends up maintaining parallel codebases, or manual processes, for each one.

No unified view. Positions live in one place, balances in another, orders in a third. Reconciling what you actually own across spot and perpetual markets, across five exchanges, at any given moment takes real work. NAV calculation becomes a weekly spreadsheet exercise instead of a live number.

Slippage on size. Small orders execute fine. When you need to move meaningful capital, market impact becomes a real cost. Without execution algorithms such as TWAP, laddering, and smart order routing, large orders leak value. Building those algorithms in house means pulling engineering away from alpha generation.

Operational overhead. Every new exchange integration is a project. Every API change is a fire drill. Time spent maintaining connections, handling errors, and reconciling fills is time not spent on strategy.

These problems tend to grow with scale rather than fade. Arkangel decided not to learn that the hard way.

About Arkangel

Arkangel is a liquid crypto fund running systematic strategies across spot and perpetual markets. The team launched recently and wanted execution and reporting infrastructure in place from the first trade rather than spending months building it internally.

The Solution: Institutional Infrastructure From the Start

When Arkangel launched, they chose Renesis instead of building trading infrastructure from scratch. That gave them institutional-grade execution and portfolio management without the costs and time of development it would otherwise take.

Unified Execution API

One API to execute across every connected exchange. Spot and perpetual markets through the same interface. The fund submits an order, and the system handles exchange-specific parameters, authentication, rate limiting, and error recovery.

The execution layer supports:

• Direct market and limit orders with automatic retry logic for network failures

• Stop orders and conditional execution for risk management

• Unified symbol handling across venues, with the system translating between exchange-specific formats

For Arkangel, this meant launching with infrastructure that was ready on the first day of trading. No legacy integrations to maintain, no technical debt to carry forward. Adding an exchange is a configuration change rather than an engineering project.

Cross-Exchange Capabilities

Trading across venues only helps if the system treats them as one book. Renesis puts every exchange behind a common model, so the fund works with positions and orders rather than venue-specific endpoints.

• One account model across exchanges. Binance, Bybit, Gate.io, OKX, Kraken spot, and Kraken Futures sit behind the same interface, including venues like Kraken that run separate products and API keys for spot and perpetuals.

• Routing that spans venues. The Smart Order Router and sweep execution described below operate across all connected exchanges at once, sending each slice to where total cost is lowest.

• Cross-exchange reconciliation. Fills and balances from every venue are matched back to a single source of truth, so the dashboard reflects what the fund actually holds across spot, margin, and perpetual accounts.

Execution Algorithms for Minimizing Market Impact

Large orders need more than a market order button. The OEMS includes execution algorithms built for institutional-scale trading, capabilities Arkangel can use as volume grows.

TWAP (Time-Weighted Average Price) slices orders across configurable time intervals, with randomization to reduce signaling and catch-up logic when it falls behind schedule. A fund can execute $500K over 30 minutes without leaving an obvious footprint.

Ladder orders post at multiple price levels at once, capturing depth without pushing through the book. Size can be distributed linearly or exponentially across levels, with automatic repricing if the market moves.

Sweep execution aggregates liquidity across venues for immediate execution when urgency matters, using IOC orders against the cheapest available prices.

Smart Order Router queries live orderbook depth across all connected exchanges and routes each slice to minimize total cost, factoring in both slippage and venue-specific fees.

These algorithms are built into the platform and ready to deploy as the strategy calls for them.

Pre-Trade Analytics

Before any order executes, the system validates:

• Balance sufficiency across the relevant accounts

• Daily trading limits for risk management

• Symbol availability and market status

• Order size against exchange minimums and maximums

Beyond validation, pre-trade analysis covers:

• Liquidity context: how the order compares to current book depth and to average daily volume

• Cost estimation: expected slippage, fees, and market impact, broken down by venue

• Scenario analysis: what changes if the fund trades 20% more or 20% less, or chooses taker over maker

Traders see what an order will cost before they commit to it.

Real-Time Portfolio Management (PMS)

The Portfolio Management Service aggregates data across every connected account into one live view. This is the layer that turns trading activity into numbers a fund can report on.

Cross-exchange NAV tracking with current and historical metrics, calculated in real time as positions change rather than rebuilt in a weekly spreadsheet. The PMS separates the real value held in the accounts from performance net of deposits and withdrawals, so trading results are not mixed up with capital flows.

Unified balance monitoring across exchanges. Spot, margin, and perpetual positions in a single view, aggregated so the fund sees one consolidated book instead of five.

Position and P&L attribution by exchange, by market, and by strategy, with full visibility into what is held where.

Performance metrics including secondary analytics such as Sharpe ratio, computed at daily, monthly, and quarterly intervals.

For a fund reporting to LPs, this is the difference between accurate reporting and estimation.

Dashboard Visibility

APIs are necessary but not sufficient. The dashboard provides:

• Real-time position and balance views across all venues

• Order history with execution analytics

• Portfolio-level metrics and performance attribution

• Venue distribution and execution quality monitoring

The Partnership: White-Glove, Not One-Size-Fits-All

Renesis does not sell a software license and walk away. The work with Arkangel was hands-on from the start, building alongside the fund through its first weeks of operation.

Understanding the strategy first. Before any integration work, the Renesis team spent time on how Arkangel planned to trade. Which markets, what order sizes, what latency requirements, and which edge cases would matter as the fund scaled.

Customization where it counts. Institutional funds do not run the same playbook. Arkangel's specific needs, including particular exchange configurations, reporting requirements, and workflow preferences, shaped how the infrastructure was set up for launch.

Iterating on feedback. Production trading surfaces things that planning does not. When Arkangel hit edge cases or needed adjustments, the response was direct work with the engineers who built the system rather than a support queue.

Growing together. As Arkangel's volume has grown and the strategy has evolved, the infrastructure has kept pace, with new capabilities, new venue support, and new analytics built in response to real requirements.

This takes more effort than shipping a SaaS product and pointing users at documentation. For institutional clients operating at scale, it is worth it.

Results: Starting Right

Running on Renesis infrastructure, Arkangel executes roughly $100M in monthly volume across spot and perpetual markets through a single API.

Zero integration overhead. No separate codebases for each exchange. Engineering goes to strategy work rather than plumbing. Infrastructure that would take a typical fund months to build was operational at launch.

Execution quality built in. Smart order routing and pre-trade analytics were available from the start. On institutional-scale volume, basis points add up.

Operational clarity. Real-time NAV, unified cross-exchange balance views, and automated reconciliation. The fund knows its actual position at any moment rather than estimating from a spreadsheet, and LP reporting reflects that.

Venue expansion on demand. Adding an exchange is configuration, not a project. When opportunity shows up on a new venue, execution can follow quickly.

What's Next

The work continues. On the roadmap:

Execution algorithms going live. Arkangel will be among the first to run TWAP, Ladder, and Smart Order Routing in production, moving from direct execution to algorithmic execution as order sizes grow.

Additional exchange support. As Arkangel expands to new venues, the infrastructure expands with it.

Advanced execution capabilities. POV (Percentage of Volume), spread trading, and multi-leg execution are in development.

Deeper analytics. Transaction cost analysis, execution quality benchmarking, and cross-exchange performance attribution are being extended for more granular insight into where value is captured and where it leaks.

The goal stays the same. Let the fund focus on returns while the infrastructure handles the rest.

Renesis builds trading infrastructure for institutional crypto funds. To learn more about how we work with clients, reach out at thomas@renesis.fi