Pintu powers next-gen crypto exchange with fast and reliable real-time data infrastructure

Challenge (1-3 paragraphs)

Reliable infrastructure for real-time trading

Pintu, an Indonesian all-in-one crypto platform with 11 million downloads and more than 4 million users, is on a mission to increase crypto literacy and serve investors of all experience levels. Launched in 2020, Pintu is one of Indonesia’s top 3 crypto apps by trading volume and number of actively trading users. 

With a user base that continues growing rapidly (nearly 40% year-over-year in early 2026) and an expanding lineup of more than 100 tokenized assets, including US stocks, ETFs, and commodities, Pintu required a reliable real-time trading infrastructure to power their premium exchange, Pintu Pro. Pro provides an enhanced trading experience with order book trading, advanced order options, and portfolio tracking. It’s built in-house by the Pintu engineering team and requires strict consistency, low latency, and high availability. 

When building Pro’s backend, the Pintu team knew they needed a fast, consistent, and resilient data streaming layer. Reliability and low latency were essential because every event carried money—and dropped or duplicated events led to incorrect balances or failed orders.

Why Redpanda

Superior performance and user experience, with self-hosted deployment 

After ruling out databases as too slow or lacking consistency guarantees, Pintu chose a message broker for its trading exchange backend. The team selected Redpanda over NATS and Apache Kafka after Redpanda outperformed the others in Pintu’s own latency testing and passed Jepsen testing with flying colors. Redpanda also offered a superior developer experience, better documentation, and ease of use while remaining compatible with the Kafka ecosystem. 

Pintu opted for Redpanda Self-Hosted Enterprise to give them greater flexibility and control, including:

• Improved latency over cloud option due to colocation
• The ability to choose their own node types (they benchmarked several and chose ARM-based storage-optimized nodes with local NVME SSDs)
• Detailed configuration knowledge allows the team to easily replicate the setup for testing and migration rehearsals

Pintu also uses the tiered storage feature, which allows them to meet compliance requirements with a low-cost, long-term storage option.

Redpanda’s team has been quick to resolve potential issues and offer guidance on maximizing platform value, according to Sergei Melekhin, Principal Software Engineer at Pintu. “We collaborated with the Redpanda team on optimization of our system to reach our sub-5ms p99 produce latency target.”

Results

Powering next-gen crypto trading with high reliability and low latency 

With Redpanda, Pintu delivers the reliability and consistency that users demand from a real-time crypto exchange. Pintu was able to meet its latency targets of sub-5ms p99 produce time and sub-20ms p99 order-to-book time. 

Redpanda’s ease of use meant Pintu got its first cluster running in less than a week, and now operates 5 brokers with a replication factor of 3. Producers require acknowledgment from all in-sync replicas, and their setup tolerates the simultaneous loss of 2 brokers without data loss. Their brokers process 7,000 events per second on average, with peaks in the tens of thousands.

“If Pintu Pro exchange is a computer, Redpanda represents the conducting tracks on the motherboard. Redpanda connects everything, and keeps the data flowing.”

As a bonus, Pintu’s data team has also enjoyed a better experience streaming data from Redpanda topics to CDC setups than with traditional RDBMs.

Redpanda lets the Pintu team focus on the exchange itself rather than keeping the data layer operational. Thanks to Redpanda’s high reliability and low latency, every Pintu Pro transaction and trade runs smoothly and quickly and can withstand market volatility swings.