It kind of does. Most exchanges are hosted in the cloud and I don't think AWS offers colocation similar to the traditional exchanges. I bet Cantor ensures that

It kind of does. Most exchanges are hosted in the cloud and I don't think AWS offers colocation similar to the traditional exchanges. I bet Cantor ensures that the machines they are using are close to those used by the exchanges. HFT on a traditional exchange will be faster but that's not the competition. The competition in crypto faces the same problems so you just need to be faster than them. Of course, if the whole process has too much uncontrollable noise (jitter) due to cloud specific reasons it probably doesn't matter. I hope they managed to control this before doing this optimization :)