How Bullet uses ClickHouse Cloud to give DeFi's fastest exchange real-time analytics

Summary

Bullet operates a DeFi exchange for perpetuals, spot trading, and lending, with trades settled on a blockchain while users retain custody of their assets. Its sub-millisecond trading system produces more than 150 million event rows per hour, creating a need for historical indexing, real-time analytics, and operational monitoring beyond the blockchain’s state-machine model. ClickHouse Cloud consumes events from Kafka, stores them in dedicated tables, and supports user features, leaderboard and reward calculations, P&L charts, audit logs, and Grafana-backed alerts. Replacing Databricks reduced query latency from 10–15 seconds to milliseconds, improved data freshness from 1–2 hours to under 5 seconds, and removed a separate DynamoDB serving layer at comparable cost while handling 1,000 times more data across staging, testnet, and mainnet.

Takeaways

1. 1

   ClickHouse Cloud’s columnar storage and compression suit Bullet’s append-only blockchain workload, which exceeds 150 million rows per hour and previously used uncompressed JSON in S3.

2. 2

   Dedicated ClickHouse tables for event types allow each dataset to be sorted and ordered around its important fields, keeping queries fast while Kafka integration avoids custom ingestion wiring.

3. 3

   Refreshable materialized views reduced leaderboard freshness from as much as 90 minutes in the previous setup to a 10-minute refresh interval, with the option to run every minute.