# Mission

Sphinx is dedicated to advancing financial exchange technologies that underpin the heart of the  trading industry. Our mission is to democratize access to institutional-grade exchange systems that support the trading of commodities, securities and their derivatives. We accomplish this by engineering blockchain infrastructure for trading applications that require institutional-grade performance within a decentralized computing framework. 

Our architecture addresses existing centralized trading systems by resolving existing bottlenecks  in order book matching, transaction execution, clearing, settlement,  trade netting, cross-asset margining and client on-boarding. Sphinx's goal is toestablish infrastructure with the following features:

* Global decentralized network to facilitate the creation and operation of our target applications
* Deterministic order matching and execution with speeds that rival traditional centralized venues using a coprocessor order book model
* Smart contract execution environments for applications such as high frequency trading, lending pools and liquidity aggregation
* EVM compatibility
* Regulatory and compliance tooling built in

***In addition to supporting exchange builders, Sphinx is also opening an energy derivatives exchange as a feature application that will leverage our infrastructure.*** 

## Our Network

The Sphinx network architecture addresses critical design tradeoffs that both decentralized and centralized exchanges face. Read more about this in [challenges-and-tradeoffs](https://docs.sphx.io/overview/challenges-and-tradeoffs "mention").  Key network elements include:

<figure><img src="https://1045505205-files.gitbook.io/~/files/v0/b/gitbook-x-prod.appspot.com/o/spaces%2FxayR8IyqtSCLSh9Ex52A%2Fuploads%2FORJaZQc8of8vPkXITxbR%2FNode%20overview.png?alt=media&#x26;token=cb80fa56-c8ec-4d5a-8314-5632436fc2e8" alt=""><figcaption></figcaption></figure>

* **Validators** - Nodes that power our high performance L1 blockchain, powered by an optimistic version of the CometBFT consensus mechanism. &#x20;
* **Coprocessors** - Discrete off-chain compute that features deterministic sub-state synchronization and provides its own transaction execution environment. Highly customizable, users can  build and deploy their own modules to the kernel.
* **Relayer**s - Full nodes that provide RPC access for clients and coprocessors, network routing and load balancing to provide ubiquitous communication for our critical infrastructure.&#x20;

<figure><img src="https://1045505205-files.gitbook.io/~/files/v0/b/gitbook-x-prod.appspot.com/o/spaces%2FxayR8IyqtSCLSh9Ex52A%2Fuploads%2F3rcj1C3VLtnJCa8KoFxq%2FData%20Flow%202.png?alt=media&#x26;token=ed7c4d3b-050d-4314-a7c8-c97b7758b5b8" alt=""><figcaption></figcaption></figure>

## What's next

While the network design and documentation are under active development, we encourage you to read more and reach out if you have questions.