Building high-performance infrastructure for Rothera’s event contract markets
Rothera was founded as a joint venture between Robinhood and Susquehanna International Group, and is led by a team with decades of experience in building and managing institutional trading venues. Its mission is to advance responsible growth in event contract markets through reliable operations, robust controls, strict compliance and listing standards, and transparent contracts that help participants express views on future outcomes, understand market expectations, make more informed decisions, and manage event-driven risk.
Against a backdrop of growing interest in event contracts and increasing regulatory scrutiny, Rothera set out to launch a new regulated platform encompassing both exchange and clearing capabilities. The immediate objective was to capture market opportunity quickly while ensuring the business did not sacrifice innovation potential, control, or platform ownership along the way. As Rothera began building, the 2026 World Cup – then only a few months away – stood out as a natural launch milestone on the calendar.
The brief
Rothera needed an exchange and clearing platform capable of supporting large numbers of concurrent contracts, low-latency trading institutional funding and collateral workflows, and continuous 24/7 operation. It also needed the flexibility to expand into additional contract categories and integrate with institutional service vendors over time, making extensibility and modularity a strategic requirement rather than a nice-to-have.
The project had to account for concrete market structure and workflow requirements, including support for multiple order books, order and trade risk management, and the ability to implement dynamic RFQ functionality in the near-term future.
Just as important, Rothera set out to avoid the longer-term constraints that typically come with vendor technology. The firm wanted ownership of its technology foundations and bespoke IP so it could shape its roadmap independently amid the continued evolution of the event contract landscape.
“Time-to-market was critical for us. Launching in time for the World Cup was imperative and we had less than five months to build. We needed to move fast but did not want to compromise on the technical foundations, or accept the longer-term constraints that typically come with vendor technology.”
Project challenges
The central challenge was time to market. Rothera needed to launch in less than five months to align with near-term market opportunities. That meant the technology foundation had to be production-ready fast, without compromising on performance, reliability, or future flexibility.
The second challenge was balancing performance with market structure requirements. The platform needed to support thousands of concurrent contracts on a low-latency, high-availability architecture in a 24/7 environment.
The third challenge was technology ownership. Rothera wanted speed, but not at the expense of future strategic control. It needed a platform that could launch quickly while still enabling the team to build differentiated business logic and retain control of bespoke IP.
"The Aeron Exchange Accelerator struck the balance, allowing us to launch quickly while assuring flexibility for our roadmap and ownership of our unique IP.
The solution
Rothera selected Adaptive’s Aeron Exchange Accelerator for its combination of high-performance exchange technology, accelerated delivery, and client ownership. The accelerator provides core trading features out-of-the-box and is built on Aeron’s market-leading open-source technical foundations, which bring the non-functional characteristics required for regulated market infrastructure: low latency, high throughput, extensibility, resilience, and support for 24/7 operations.
At the architecture level, Rothera’s platform design featured separate exchange and clearing environments, with each core hosted on its own three-node cluster. This enables the exchange side to preserve matching-path performance while delivering resilience and fault tolerance on the clearing side via its own highly available environment. Both layers are connected by real-time bridge processes.
This foundation gives Rothera the low latency, high throughput, and resilience required for continuous 24/7 trading, alongside an extensible and modular architecture designed for future growth. Moreover, Rothera can build differentiated business logic on top of this high-performance infrastructure foundation.
The delivery model was designed as a collaborative build rather than a static software handoff. Multidisciplinary Adaptive teams spanning project management, business analysis, engineering, QA and SRE worked alongside Rothera’s product and engineering teams on MVP functionality, integrations, and operational tooling.
The underlying delivery plan was structured around progressive milestone-based capability delivery, moving from initial deployment through futures support, customer and account models, swaps support, binary options support, reporting and treasury capabilities, and finally feature completion.
From a business perspective, this was the critical balance: launch-ready infrastructure on one side, strategic independence and ability to tailor the platform on the other.
Outcomes and benefits
The immediate result was speed to market. Rothera launched its institutional-grade exchange and clearing platform in under five months. That enabled the business to begin offering event-driven trading opportunities tied to planned and emergent world events, including the 2026 FIFA World Cup.
The platform delivered early commercial traction. In its first two months of operations, it traded $3 billion in contracts and approached a 10% share of US event contract market volume. All told, Rothera’s platform saw 3.44 billion contracts traded across the tournament, averaging 29.6 million contracts per game [Read more >>].
Strategically, Rothera now has a platform built for scale and expansion. As event contract markets continue to grow, the modularity of the exchange platform positions the company to move beyond binary events into broader derivative products and asset classes over the coming months.
“I’ve launched or managed 14 exchange platforms in my career. This was the most aggressive launch timeline of any of them, with an immovable target date. Our margin for error was effectively nil, and we stuck the landing.”
Conclusion
For Rothera, the project was about more than standing up a new venue quickly. It was about launching regulated market infrastructure at speed while preserving the performance, extensibility, and strategic control needed to compete over the long term.
Adaptive’s Aeron Exchange Accelerator provided that balance by delivering proven exchange and clearing foundations, domain expertise, and ongoing operational support, while enabling Rothera to retain control of the technology and business logic that define its market model, roadmap, and long-term differentiation.
“I have worked with Adaptive before, and their combination of subject matter expertise, accelerator technology, and close collaboration with our team made the Aeron Exchange Accelerator a natural choice.”