A decades-old quant firm executing 50,000+ trades per day discovered that 150ms signing latency variance was costing them nearly a million dollars annually. Through a 3-week deployment, they recovered that alpha permanently.
This quantitative fund was executing 50,000+ trades per day using a sophisticated MPC wallet provider for key management. While operationally sound, the MPC solution introduced systematic latency variance that had become invisible in their infrastructure dashboards.
The problem wasn't discovered through monitoring—it surfaced during a forensic latency audit. Analysis revealed:
For a firm optimizing every basis point, this represented unacceptable execution variance. Yet the MPC provider couldn't guarantee better performance—the latency was structural to their architecture.
ZeroCopy proposed a hardware-based alternative: migrate from MPC to Sentinel Enclaves, deployed as a drop-in sidecar in their existing AWS VPC. The key advantages:
Sentinel Enclave deployed in AWS Nitro environment within the fund's private VPC. Order signing flow: Trading Engine → Sentinel Enclave (local gRPC) → Exchange. No latency added; variance eliminated.
The migration was completed over 3 weeks with our Platform License engagement, including architecture review, load testing, and regulatory compliance validation.
3,095x improvement in signing latency. P99 latency now deterministic at 42µs with 2.1µs standard deviation.
Jitter tax eliminated. The systematic variance that was leaking alpha is now gone. Returns normalized.
Zero key compromises or security incidents. Hardware attestation validates every signature. Full regulatory compliance maintained.
Uptime guarantee backed by SLA. Enclave design supports failover to secondary region in < 500ms.
The fund deployed Sentinel in January. By March, the infrastructure was fully validated in production with zero application changes. By May, they had recovered the entire annual jitter tax cost in actual alpha realization. The ROI was immediate.
Perhaps most importantly: they can now confidently scale trading volume without being constrained by signing latency variance. The infrastructure is no longer the bottleneck—execution quality is.
"We didn't realize how much money we were leaving on the table until we actually measured it. The latency variance was invisible in our dashboards. It took a forensic audit to surface it. Once we fixed it, the alpha recovery was immediate."
Your fund may have the same hidden jitter tax. Let's measure it.
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