Imagine a means to get to market faster, smoother and easier while saving money along the way? It may not be quite the beach but the prevailing weather for new markets is lovely here notes Fintech Pioneer, author and former exchange CEO Patrick L Young

“Summertime and the living is easy” went the George Gershwin classic and in markets who doesn’t value a little beach time as the sun shines and the sea waters are elegantly warm?

At the same time, it’s a great season to make plans. Therein lies a delightful opportunity which has shades of beach but also offers productive blue sky product mining with flexibility and low cost.

What’s not to like?  

Welcome to the Exberry Sandbox, where you may be miles from the beach but it’s easier than ever to dip your toes into the new market waters.

The Exberry Sandbox gives you the opportunity to imagine a new market in… Anything. Delivered as SaaS and deployable on any cloud, the Exberry platform remains entirely asset agnostic.. Sun, sea, sand? Whatever you want to create as the base for a product, in equities, commodities, fixed income, prediction, perpetuals, digital securities or ETF related products, they can all be shaped and tested before capital, reputation and regulatory oxygen are committed to a live launch. Take B3 Digitas who deployed the Exberry Sandbox for potential future crypto products. pronouncing themselves delighted with the programme. CTO Alexandre Oliveira notes:

“The onboarding process was very seamless. The solution was stable, the team was close to us, and anything we needed they provided very fast. When we were ready to move to production, the environment was up and running in just a few days.”

With a 24*7 interface, the Exberry Sandbox is always on for your product idea and it comes with a full suite of functionality through data connections so you get the real feel of having your market operate. As you expand into more advanced tests, the system can move with you but is always delivering a low expenditure model to give ample space to develop cost effectively.

With the potential product only bounded by your imagination, the delivery is simple and swift, enabling a testbed which can replicate real-world operations alongside a potential to speedily simulate your market in a real-time environment. That can facilitate planning and frees up internal resource, because you can take your market to potential participants and investors while demonstrating a working prototype, ahead of upgrading your sandbox to a full production market. In other words, a dynamic acceleration of planning and testing also de-risks the whole launch process. Through market model experimentation your new product can be honed to the right form of trading environment to maximise efficiency, participation and volume.

Thus you can design your market precisely as you dream it but also develop in a real-world environment to reflect the dynamics as they impact the product.

The possible products are essentially boundless. “The empires of the future are the empires of the mind” as Sir Winston Churchill memorably opined way back when life was much more thoroughly analogue.

However be it commodities or bonds, equities, warrants or ETCs/ETFs, all can easily be accommodated in Exberry Sandbox. Naturally crypto and digital asset markets can easily be facilitated and with Exberry having a history in delivering seamless access to digital asset settlement solutions, there are no limitations post testing to distributing your digital asset market to reality once you have honed the market model.

For existing exchanges, the sandbox is equally valuable as a modernisation bridge. It allows teams to test new market models, workflows and integrations alongside legacy infrastructure rather than forcing a risky “big bang” replacement. Thus the sandbox also helps regulated entities collapse the time to market without adding real money risk in the developmental phase. That’s especially useful in the current era where everyone in the ecosystem: banks / brokers / market infrastructures have IT departments perpetually under duress to deliver / juggle / prioritise multiple upgrades and new projects across an often dizzying number of different departments / internal requirements. The Exberry Sandbox can be easily configured within an institution to facilitate new product experimentation without having to allocate a lot of internal developer or even system administrator time. Risk can be managed as the system remains elegantly online for testing but offline insofar as it touches critical real money architecture. That level of insulation helps keep the circadian rhythms of risk managers in much better order without reducing the “real world” feel of testing in a live simulation. Such are the joys of SaaS meeting sassy product development. The Exberry Sandbox brings your product to life 24*7 365 days a year without reducing the system capacity you need to maintain existing market operations. The sandbox is a de facto market infrastructure modernisation tool as much as it is a mechanism to de-risk the product launch process. 

What I love about this Exberry Sandbox is the way it looks to the future of markets, a topic close to my heart. We spend our days (and nights) building new markets. The most important thing to remember is that the single holy grail of market development is a myth. Some products blossom rapidly and become liquid. Others take ages and are palpably late developers. That said all markets, like any good arboretum, require elegant nurturing. By being able to place products in a private sandbox the nurturing of new markets can be honed elegantly to deliver a shrub into real-world production that has vastly more potential to blossom into a magnificent product within a locality, region, nation, continent or indeed the whole world…for a few hours per day or a full 24*7 environment with, ultimately settlement as the market prefers T+whatever, or even instantaneous conclusion.

De-risking a market is not only about technology performance. It is also about testing whether the market can remain orderly: how price bands behave, how circuit breakers are calibrated, how participants interact with the book, and how liquidity responds under stress. With on demand access and customer support throughout the process, Exberry provides its sandbox as an elegant means to bring new products to life.

About the author:

Patrick L Young is the author of Capital Market Revolution! (FT, 1999), the first bestselling book on fintech, and has spent more than 30 years shaping the future of finance and markets. Since the earliest days of online finance, he has been a pioneer in digital assets, prediction markets, single-stock futures and the creation of new cash and derivatives marketplaces. Today, alongside his work building the markets of the future, Patrick publishes Exchange Invest (ExchangeInvest.com), the world’s only daily digest dedicated to the business of public exchanges, read by financial-market leaders around the globe.