The world’s fastest financial accounting database

Not to mention the smallest and toughest. An incredible storage fault model. TigerBeetle is the system of record for the next generation of financial services.

Safety

An incredible storage fault model.

Most distributed databases have network fault models, but TigerBeetle survives even the toughest of storage fault models. Firmware that sends writes to the wrong disk sector. Kernel page caches that misrepresent the disk. Filesystems that fail to detect the corruption of critical file metadata such as the log file size. Not to mention slowly failing hardware. TigerBeetle keeps on running with predictable performance.

Strict serializability

Automated leader election

Protocol-aware recovery from corruption and grey failure latency spikes

No stale reads

Performance

Orders of magnitude more performance with room to spare.

Faster than a generic in-memory database but with replicated persistence for every transaction, zero deserialization with cache line aligned data structures, zero copy with Direct I/O, zero syscalls with io_uring, and static allocation of memory (and storage). More performance reduces cost and leaves a large margin of safety to absorb the unexpected. TigerBeetle is ludicrously fast with a small footprint to boot. Why big iron when you can beetle?

1000x

faster than ad hoc balance tracking

50%

more efficient than a one-phase ledger

50%

more write availability in the critical path

20%

smaller clusters with flexible quorums

Experience

The future of payments infrastructure is debits and credits.

TigerBeetle’s accounting primitives propel distributed balance tracking into the age of high-volume digital payments. In the past, developers had to glue everything together with multiple queries, moving the data back and forth across the network to run the business logic. TigerBeetle inverts the equation and moves the code to the data, to enforce the accounting policy needed to transfer thousands of amounts between accounts, all in a single query.

1.

Model your financial domain as it is: double-entry T-accounts

2.

Design your chart of accounts for the perfect schema

3.

Never do a SQL schema migration again

T-Accounts

TigerBeetle does double-entry accounting like Newton’s Third Law. For every transfer to an account, there is an equal and opposite transfer from a different account.

Linked Events

Multiple transfers between multiple accounts may be linked together to succeed or fail as an atomic unit.

Net Balance Limits

Accounts may enforce net balance limits, such as debits may not exceed credits, or credits may not exceed debits.

Chart of Accounts

Accounts and transfers may specify a chart of accounts code so you can query for accounts or transfers of a given type.

Connected Systems

Accounts and transfers stay connected to third-party entities (many-to-one) through a 128-bit user data identifier.

Multi-Tenant Currencies

A cluster may contain accounts denominated in different currencies or units of value, with transfers only ever between accounts of the same unit.

Two-Phase Transfers

Out of the box. Reserve transfer debits and credits in the first phase, and accept or reject these amounts in the second phase, with monotonic clock timeouts. The perfect atomic primitive for reliable transfers across different systems.

Inflight Balances

TigerBeetle can distinguish between inflight reserved amounts and committed accepted amounts to control inflight liquidity.

Here’s to the pioneers

Martin Thompson
Remzi Arpaci-Dusseau
Andrea Arpaci-Dusseau
James Cowling
Barbara Liskov
Andrew Kelley

TigerBeetle follows the state of the art in financial exchange architectures advanced by Martin Thompson and LMAX, a lockless thread-per-core design with mechanical sympathy that models the system of record as a replicated state machine for fault-tolerance.

TigerBeetle incorporates groundbreaking research on storage faults led by Remzi and Andrea Arpaci-Dusseau at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

At the heart of TigerBeetle is the pioneering Viewstamped Replication consensus protocol developed by Brian M. Oki with Turing Award-winner Barbara Liskov and later James Cowling at MIT for low-latency leader election and optimal strict serializability.

Finally, TigerBeetle is written in Zig, a revolutionary systems language designed by Andrew Kelley.

Production release in 2024

TigerBeetle is open-source under the Apache-2.0 License and is currently in beta, while we engage in automated testing and audits of our consensus and replication protocol, storage, networking and state machine. The production release of TigerBeetle is imminent.

400,000 TPS
ProtoBeetle
Jul 2020
800,000 TPS
AlphaBeetle
Oct 2020
1,000,000 TPS
TigerBeetle
Design Target
Already designing for TigerBeetle
Mojaloop FoundationInterledger FoundationSenapt Limited