Design Coinbase Explore (Real-time Crypto Prices)

Design https://www.coinbase.com/explore - a page showing real-time cryptocurrency prices.

Requirements:

• Display ~20,000 cryptocurrencies
• Real-time price updates from exchange feeds
• Support sorting, filtering, search
• Handle high traffic (millions of concurrent users)

Key Components:

• Price Aggregation Service (from multiple exchanges)
• WebSocket Server (push updates to clients)
• Price Cache (Redis)
• History Database (time-series DB like InfluxDB)
• CDN for static assets

Discussion Points:

1. Push vs Pull for price updates (WebSocket vs Polling)
2. Price aggregation from multiple exchanges
3. Handling stale data
4. Client-side rendering optimization (virtualization)
5. WebSocket scaling (connection limits)

Data Flow:

1. Exchange feeds → Price Aggregator
2. Aggregator → Redis Cache + Kafka
3. WebSocket servers subscribe to Kafka
4. Clients connect to WebSocket servers

// Functionality to add full integration TBD, in the meantime, please check out the problem description to see what you might expect in the interview!