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Dying · US7434096
Match server for a financial exchange having fault tolerant operation
The last of the launch-window countdowns: CME's fault-tolerant match-server architecture, the machinery that keeps an exchange's order book alive when a server dies mid-session.
Assignee: Chicago Mercantile Exchange Inc. · Filed 2006-08-11 · Granted 2008-10-07 · Est. expiry 2026-08-11
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Dates here are estimates from patent-term math (20 years from filing, or the older 17-from-grant/20-from-filing rule for pre-1995 filings), not a legal determination. They ignore patent-term adjustments, extensions, and terminal disclaimers, and don't reflect maintenance-fee lapses that haven't happened yet. This is not legal advice.
CME — the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, one of the largest derivatives markets in the world — filed US7434096 in August 2006, describing a match server built to keep matching orders even when a piece of the system fails. Uptime, for an exchange, is existential; a matching engine that goes dark mid-session can strand positions and freeze a market.
The patent granted in October 2008, right in the middle of the financial crisis, while exchanges everywhere were being tested by exactly the kind of volume and stress the fault-tolerant design was meant to survive.
Term runs out August 11, 2026 — twenty years after filing. The specific engineering pattern for keeping a matching engine alive through a fault becomes available to any exchange operator, or anyone building one, without a call to CME's licensing desk.
Patent record: US7434096