Kraken’s Cryptowatch ships desktop trading terminal for expert traders

One desktop app, many exchanges.

The Cryptowatch platform, a subsidiary of the Kraken exchange, announced on Tuesday the release of its desktop-based trading app.

Cryptowatch is a trading terminal that aims to group most market data and exchanges under one roof. Traders using the platform are able to connect their accounts across many popular exchanges and place orders on all of them through a single interface.

Up until now, the platform could only be accessed through a web browser. The launch of Cryptowatch Desktop, an application for Windows, MacOS and Linux, aims to provide a similar experience while benefiting from faster native performance.

In a demonstration shown to Cointelegraph, the platform appeared fluid and responsive even as the panes with live market data were resized on-the-fly. Tests made by the team and some external observers seem to show that the desktop platform has a stable memory footprint of 50 Megabytes, while the web-based alternatives eventually come to use more than three Gigabytes. Cryptowatch Desktop’s features are still somewhat limited compared to the web version, but that is expected to change over time as development continues.

The software is coded with Rust, a low-level language similar to C++ that is seeing increasing adoption in crypto due to its powerful functionality and safety guarantees.

Artur Sapek, founder of Cryptowatch, said that this is a change in approach from the mainstream approach to building applications:

“Somehow the world became okay with everything happening in bloated, laggy web applications. We reject this as the end-all application stack and are breaking new ground with Rust. 

As part of the platform’s development, the company sponsored iced, a Rust-based open-source framework for building graphical interfaces. The team wanted to test the idea that Rust could be used to build graphical software, and the “results are incredible,” said Clark Moody, project manager of Cryptowatch Desktop.

It is worth noting that Rust can also be used on the web through WebAssembly, a framework that allows developers to build browser applications with much higher performance over the traditional JavaScr. WebAssembly is also increasingly being deployed in blockchain environments, for example Polkadot’s Substrate framework.

Representatives from Cryptowatch told Cointelegraph that they “are evaluating using WebAssembly for certain parts of the future web platform.” Nevertheless, a planned update for this week is expected to reduce CPU usage by 50% in certain conditions, the team said.

Cryptowatch is accessible for all, but it is primarily targeted for expert traders who may need a higher level of performance and speed than what is offered by standard exchange interfaces.