Case Study — Exchange Connectivity & Order Entry

Connecting to the Dojima Exchange

Multi-protocol connectivity and a shared, multi-broker order-entry platform for the rebirth of Japan's oldest commodity marketplace — built on FIX 4.2, SoupBinTCP, and the ITCH / OUCH / Glimpse protocol suite. Delivered 2022–2024.

Executive Summary

The Dojima Exchange — heir to the Dojima Rice Exchange, widely regarded as the world's first organised futures market, and a former Touch-Fire customer in its earlier incarnation as the Kansai Commodity Exchange — launched an all-new trading platform for a new generation of listed commodity futures.

Touch-Fire was engaged to build the connectivity and a streamlined order-entry system capable of serving multiple brokers from a single shared platform. The venue operates a day and night session on a schedule closely mirroring Tocom, with daily-rolling futures, designated liquidity providers, and a modern order-by-order market data feed — requirements that demanded fluency across several distinct exchange protocols at once.

Technical Architecture

The Dojima platform exposes its trading and market-data interfaces over several protocols simultaneously. Touch-Fire implemented adapters for the full suite so that brokers could connect through a single, consistent gateway.

  • FIX 4.2 Order Session: New Order Single, Cancel, Cancel/Replace, and the corresponding Execution Reports (Accepted, Rejected, Cancelled, Replaced, Traded), plus Trading Session Status and Business Message Reject.
  • FIX Drop-Copy Session: a parallel feed of Accepted, Replaced, Cancelled and Trade execution reports for back-up monitoring and back-office capture — carefully handling MPID / Client-ID differences between the order and drop-copy feeds.
  • OUCH over SoupBinTCP: a low-level binary order interface as an alternative to FIX, including the venue's market-maker Post Only order type.

Unlike aggregated price feeds, Dojima publishes a fully non-aggregated, order-granular market data feed — every individual order add, delete, replace and execution carries its own Order ID.

  • Glimpse snapshot (SoupBinTCP): an initial book snapshot stamped with the sequence number of the next ITCH message, a reference price, nanosecond timestamps, and the current trading state (Trading / Suspended, Day / Night market).
  • ITCH real-time feed: incremental OrderAdded, OrderDelete, OrderReplaced and OrderExecuted messages — reconstructed into a live order book that stays perfectly in sync with the venue.
  • Designated Liquidity Provider (DLP): a dedicated order type flag, handled analogously to the DLP / market-maker quoting models on TFX and OSE-FX.

Building on the proven model from our cryptocurrency exchange work, the venue price feed was implemented as a dedicated C# component publishing onto an internal ZeroMQ (ZMQ) data bus.

This decoupling means any number of downstream components — the web front-end's SignalR API, back-office capture, monitoring tools — can subscribe to a single normalised data stream, and the project work could be parallelised cleanly across the team.

Dojima ITCH / Glimpse → C# Feed Handler → Internal ZMQ Bus → SignalR Web Front-End

The order-entry layer normalises the venue's specifics so brokers see a clean, predictable interface:

  • Limit orders with Day / IOC / FOK time-in-force and House / Client designation.
  • Post Only liquidity-provider orders that reject rather than remove resting liquidity.
  • Day and Night market state handling on a Tocom-style schedule, with daily-rolling futures and a dedicated settlement-price feed.
  • Exchange-driven rejections surfaced clearly — price-band breaches, stale orders and surveillance holds.

For exchange-traded systems, every event ultimately originates from a client order. Touch-Fire's test approach generates initial client orders and asserts the exact, correctly-timed sequence of execution reports for each scenario — a venue-specific test script that validates the full round trip from order entry through market data to fill and clearing capture.

Results & Impact

Delivered full order-entry and market-data connectivity to Japan's newest commodity exchange, ready for the new platform's go-live and the listing of daily-rolling commodity futures. A single shared system serves multiple brokers concurrently, each with isolated order entry and monitoring — lowering the cost of access for participants joining the new market. The ITCH / OUCH / Glimpse / SoupBinTCP and FIX 4.2 adapters extend Touch-Fire's catalogue of exchange connectors, ready to be redeployed for the next venue integration.

Related Capabilities

Real-time and EOD clearing for Japan's Tokyo Financial Exchange FX and CFD markets. Sub-millisecond CLOB matching, multi-venue routing and institutional order types. Mid- and back-office, clearing and post-trade reporting for high-volume venues.

Launching or Joining a New Venue?

Touch-Fire has connected to exchanges across Japan and Asia over three decades — across FIX, ITCH/OUCH, SoupBinTCP and bespoke protocols. Talk to us about your connectivity and order-entry requirements.

Contact us to discuss your connectivity requirements.