Exchanges and Market Platforms Are Operating at Nanosecond Time
In modern electronic markets, time is no longer a background technical detail. It has become central to how markets operate, how events are reconstructed, and how confidence in market integrity is established.
As trading has become faster, more fragmented, and increasingly automated, exchanges, market platforms, and reporting facilities have steadily increased the resolution of their timestamps. Nanosecond-level time is now widely used in market data, surveillance, and post-trade analysis because it allows events to be ordered and examined with greater clarity across venues.
This shift is not driven by regulation alone. It reflects practical market realities: high message rates, complex routing, and the need to reconstruct sequences of activity across multiple systems without ambiguity.
What was once considered extreme precision is increasingly treated as normal operating resolution.
Why Nanoseconds Matter
A nanosecond is one billionth of a second. At today’s market speeds, differences at the microsecond or even sub-microsecond level can affect how events appear to be ordered when data from multiple sources is combined.
High-resolution time supports:
· Accurate event sequencing across fragmented venues
· Market surveillance and analytics that depend on ordering, not just timestamps
· Operational confidence during investigations, disputes, or abnormal market events
It is important to distinguish timestamp resolution from timestamp accuracy. Nanosecond timestamps do not imply nanosecond accuracy. However, higher resolution increases the burden on downstream systems to ensure time is consistent, traceable to UTC, and defensible under scrutiny.
Regulators do not universally mandate nanosecond accuracy. But regulatory frameworks increasingly assume firms can measure, monitor, and evidence time with sufficient granularity to support modern market operations.
Market Reality Today
This transition is already well established.
Cboe’s US Options exchanges have introduced nanosecond-precision timestamps for order and transaction data, with phased client support and opt-in capabilities. These changes reflect the realities of modern message rates and the need for precise event ordering.¹
In the United States, FINRA Trade Reporting Facilities operated in partnership with Nasdaq and NYSE have supported nanosecond timestamp granularity for years, particularly within CAT and post-trade reporting workflows.²
In Europe, MiFID II and MiFIR RTS 25 do not mandate nanosecond accuracy. However, they require firms to timestamp events with increasing precision depending on activity type and to demonstrate traceability to UTC. As a result, many venues and data providers operate internally at nanosecond resolution to support surveillance, reconciliation, and compliance processes.³
Beyond exchanges themselves, market data vendors and analytics platforms routinely distribute data with nanosecond timestamps, enabling tick-level analysis, latency studies, and cross-venue surveillance.
What This Means for Firms
Operating in a nanosecond-observed market changes expectations, even if regulatory thresholds have not formally changed.
Firms should consider whether:
· Their systems can ingest and normalise nanosecond timestamps without introducing ambiguity
· Time remains consistent across trading, market data, and reporting environments
· They can evidence how time is generated, monitored, and corrected, not just assert accuracy
· Timestamp resolution across venues creates implicit comparability pressure during reviews or investigations
In practice, the question is shifting from “Are we compliant?” to “Can we clearly explain and defend our timelines when the market observes events at nanosecond resolution?”
Takeaway
Nanosecond time is not a new regulatory mandate. It has become the reference frame within which modern markets observe, analyse, and evaluate behaviour.
As exchanges and market platforms operate at nanosecond resolution, market participants must ensure their own systems can ingest, store, and interpret high-resolution time without introducing drift, inconsistency, or uncertainty.
This is not simply a data-format change. It is an infrastructure and governance challenge spanning trading systems, compliance, market data, and post-event analysis.
If your organisation is assessing how it aligns with evolving market timing expectations, understanding how resilient, UTC-traceable time supports modern market infrastructure is a useful place to start.