We have significantly improved our ledger at Alpaca to enhance transaction processing times, allowing for 24/7 access to multiple asset classes and reducing delays in onboarding or funding flows. Our goal was to process transactions without any batch processing delays, which is critical for timely customer funding and trading. We achieved this by moving away from synchronous updates to asynchronous updates, resulting in a marked improvement in transaction processing times during End of Day processes, bringing down the median time from over 15 seconds to under 250ms. Our aim is to further reduce journaling time by 50% in the coming months to set the industry standard for journal processing times.