Pharos Production Delivered a Production-Grade Crypto Exchange Platform
Pharos Production built the cryptocurrency exchange we operate today. The
engagement ran about 18 months, from architecture through production launch,
and the team stayed on afterwards to support what they shipped.
The hard requirement was regulatory and it was there from the first
architecture session. We needed a venue that could serve EU users as an
authorised CASP under MiCA and open to the US market later without a rebuild.
Pharos Production designed the compliance workflows, the listing policy and
the custody model against MiCA from day one and built stablecoin handling to
line up with the GENIUS Act framework well ahead of its 2027 effective date.
Two regimes, one codebase.
We came in with a specification, a deadline and one assumption that turned
out to be expensive. Their architects pushed back on our custody design in
the third week. We had planned a single pooled wallet with client balances
tracked in our own ledger - faster to build and we assumed the internal
accounting was what a regulator would look at. They told us MiCA cares where
the assets sit on-chain, not what our database says: client holdings needed
their own addresses, their own key management and a per-client register from
the start. We argued about it. They were right and had we shipped the pooled
version we would have been migrating live customer balances on-chain a year
later.
Pharos Production delivered the trading engine and order book, user account
infrastructure, custody and wallet management, transaction processing,
KYC/AML compliance workflows, admin tooling and reporting. Six third-party
integrations. Forty-four assets and networks live on day one.
On numbers: the platform carried 28,000 concurrent users at API response
times around 80 ms and ran at 99.98% availability across its first four
months in production, with no critical security incidents.
Delivery was the part I expected to be painful and wasn't. Every planned
milestone landed on schedule, the project closed on the approved budget and
releases went out steadily - eight production deployments a month on a
platform sitting under two regulatory regimes. Critical issues came back
acknowledged in minutes.
I would recommend Pharos Production to anyone building a crypto exchange, a
digital asset platform, or any fintech system where downtime is a compliance
event and not just an inconvenience.
Reply from Pharos Production Inc.
Thank you for writing this out in that much detail and for letting us argue with you in week three.
Pharos Production is a software development and AI engineering company. We have been building FinTech, Web3 and high-load systems since 2013 and regulated cryptocurrency exchange development is one of our core practices. Your account is a fair picture of what that work looks like: roughly 18 months from the first architecture session to production launch, then ongoing support of what we shipped.
On custody we would make the same argument again and we make it with every exchange client. Under MiCA a CASP is assessed on where client assets actually sit on-chain, not on how an internal ledger accounts for them. Segregated client addresses, dedicated key management and a per-client register have to exist before launch, because retrofitting them means moving live customer balances on-chain with real money already in the system. The same reasoning shaped the stablecoin flows, which we structured against the GENIUS Act framework ahead of its 2027 effective date so that the US route stays open without a rebuild.
Honestly, that third week is the part of the engagement we would rather be judged on than the delivery numbers. The most expensive failure we see in this market is a specification that is cheap to build and costly to be audited against. It almost never announces itself. It arrives a year after launch, as a migration.
For anyone weighing a similar build, here is what we delivered: the trading engine and order book, user account infrastructure, custody and wallet management, transaction processing, KYC/AML compliance workflows, admin tooling and reporting. Six third-party integrations. Forty-four assets and networks live on day one. The platform carried 28,000 concurrent users at API response times around 80 ms and ran at 99.98% availability across its first four months in production, with no critical security incidents. Eight production deployments a month, under two regulatory regimes at once.
A regulated digital asset platform is either built this way or rebuilt later. Thank you for trusting us with yours. We are ready when the US expansion starts.
Dmytro Nasyrov
Founder & CTO, Pharos Production
