Gateways
Frontends never talk directly to validators. Instead, traders hit regional gateways (DE, USA today; six more regions for mainnet). The gateway:
- Terminates TLS and rate-limits.
- Batches reads from validators via a fan-out cache.
- Turns the matching-engine stream into MessagePack-over-WebSocket.
Client routing
The frontend measures RTT to each gateway at startup, pins the winner to a cookie, and recovers to the next-best on a 3-strike failure. See apps/app/src/lib/probe.ts once Phase 4a2 lands.
Validator set
Testnet runs 5 validators; mainnet targets 50–100 globally distributed. Validators run on bare-metal with a minimum 1 Gbps uplink — LiberX does not scale down to "home validators" by design.