Beginning in Q4 2025, ICE plans to offer the ICE Binary Order API as an option for clients to connect to the ICE Derivatives Trading Platform and submit orders and order modifications for various products across different exchanges.
This API uses Simple Binary Encoding (SBE) which has optimized encoding and decoding for low latency and minimized bandwidth requirements.
This will serve as an alternative to the existing FIX Order Routing API.
Key Benefits of ICE Binary Order API
- ICE’s design goal for the Binary Gateway (BGW) when compared to FIX is for it to reduce jitter/latency and provide better transparency to enable clients to better simulate markets for new trading strategy deployment or fine-tuning for existing strategies.
- Improve load balancing/resource utilization across all our servers and remove dependency on a third-party load balancer for API order entry.
ICE will continue to support the FIX Order Routing API for the foreseeable future, but the Binary Gateway will become the strategic and preferred path for lower and more consistent latency to the matching engine. Future investments in performance and infrastructure will focus on the Binary platform.
Going forward, customers who prioritize lowest-latency execution for the ICE Derivatives Trading platform will be encouraged to integrate to the Binary Gateway. The target go-live dates for the Binary Gateway are October 31, 2025, for all products supported in the Basildon silo and February 20, 2026, for all products supported in the Chicago silo (all ICE Futures U.S. products are supported in the Chicago silo).
