from Hacker News

Aries could be 'Unity for fintech'

by joshdance on 2/19/25, 9:41 PM with 6 comments

Just found this super interesting project called Aries Engine. They're pitching themselves as the Unity/Unreal of fintech, which caught my attention. The idea makes sense - before Unreal, game devs would burn cash just building physics engines before touching actual gameplay. Similarly, fintech startups often die dealing with:

Regulatory compliance Market data fees Infrastructure/broker-dealer setup They just got SEC and FINRA (FINRA stands for Financial Industry Regulatory Authority. It's a private, non-governmental organization that regulates the U.S. securities industry) approval and are launching an open development platform that supposedly handles a lot of this. They have built two reference apps they're open-sourcing:

An infinite canvas trading platform (widgets + TradingView/Discord integration) Mobile trading app Tech stack includes the usual suspects: commission-free trading APIs, options chain data, real-time feeds, etc. Team apparently built APIs for major brokerages before.

They have 16k+ MVP users. Planning futures/commodities and international. Crypto exchange in the works too (whitepaper available).

FINRA check: https://brokercheck.finra.org/firm/summary/330235

Anyone here tried building fintech products before? Curious how significant this could be. The FINRA approval seems legit, but interested in hearing takes from people who've dealt with these infrastructure problems firsthand.

Tweets talking about it.

https://x.com/Aries/status/1892281286301020671

https://x.com/DeItaone/status/1892280491111293355

Thoughts?

  • by RedaFalih-Aries on 2/19/25, 10:50 PM

    Hi, im the CEO at Aries. The Unity Parallel is a great one to draw, our goal is to be a complete fintech development engine.

    Large banks and institutions can afford to pay past regulatory & infra barriers but in our time building APIs for brokerage like TradeStation and interviewing developers/entrepreneurs we found that not only does Fintech have one of the highest startup failure rates but most of those failures can boil down to regulation, data fees, and infra hurdles that fintech entrepreneurs need to jump over. We’re designed to do all of the leg work so that builders can focus on building and getting to market from day one.

    To show off the power of our engine product we built two, soon to be open source, flagship products people can use to trade US equities and options. The first is Aries Infinite which is an infinite canvas product for trading and the second is a low latency mobile trading app for US capital markets. You can see them both at Aries.com

  • by jqpabc123 on 2/19/25, 10:29 PM

    Looks like what used to be called a "stock broker" to me.

    Maybe I'm behind the times but this not exactly what I think of as "fintech".

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fintech