42µs: How Deterministic Execution Beats Cloud Signing

Why your signing infrastructure is bleeding money, and how to fix it.

The Speed of Light Problem

Every millisecond of latency in your signing infrastructure costs you money. Not metaphorically—literally.

Light travels at ~200 km/ms in fiber optic cable. When you sign a transaction with AWS KMS, your data must:

1. Leave your instance (1-2ms network stack)
2. Travel to the KMS endpoint (1-5ms, depending on region)
3. Wait in queue (10-100ms, depending on load)
4. Get signed (0.5ms)
5. Return (1-5ms)

Total: 100-300ms. In that time, light could travel 60,000 kilometers—almost twice around the Earth.

For high-frequency trading, 100ms is eternity. The market has moved. Your quote is stale. You either miss the trade or get adversely selected.

The Jitter Tax

The real killer isn’t average latency—it’s variance.

If your signing takes 50ms one time and 200ms the next, you can’t price your risk. You have to widen your spreads to account for the uncertainty.

We call this the Jitter Tax:

Annual Loss = (σ_jitter / 1000) × Slippage × Volume × 252

At $100M daily volume with 150ms of jitter, you're bleeding **~$378,000/year** in pure slippage. That’s the cost of using “easy” cloud infrastructure.

The Solution: Return to Metal

At Sentinel Prime, we asked: What is the absolute physical limit of a digital signature?

The answer: 42 microseconds.

Not milliseconds. Microseconds.

How We Get There

We strip away the network:

The Kernel Configuration

Our AMI uses these boot parameters:

isolcpus=2-127 nohz_full=2-127 rcu_nocbs=2-127 intel_idle.max_cstate=0

Translation:

• Cores 2-127 are yours. The OS cannot touch them.
• The kernel timer is disabled on those cores. No interrupts.
• C-states are disabled. The CPU is always awake, waiting.

We don’t “optimize” code. We optimize the environment. We construct a clean room in a dirty cloud.

The Benchmark

On c6i.metal (Ice Lake, 128 vCPU):

Yes, nanoseconds. When you remove the OS from the equation, you’re limited only by memory access speed.

Verification

Don’t trust us. Verify.

1. Run our audit CLI:

curl -sL https://zerocopy.systems/audit | bash

2. Check your enclave PCRs:

nitro-cli describe-enclaves

3. Compare against our published measurements: docs/measurements/README.md

If the hashes match, you know you’re running our code. No trust required.

The Bottom Line

• AWS KMS: ~160ms
• Fireblocks MPC: ~300-600ms
• Turnkey: ~50-100ms
• Sentinel Prime: ~42µs

That’s 3,800x faster than KMS. Not by writing better code—by understanding the physics.

Stop paying the Jitter Tax.

Questions? security@zerocopy.systems