How Aries built an infinite trading terminal with tldraw
Aries built Aries Infinite, an infinite canvas trading app, on the tldraw SDK. Traders can now arrange live charts, news, and AI-generated widgets on one screen instead of a wall of monitors. All your data, from anywhere, no context-switching needed.
Most trading platforms give you a fixed screen. You pick your widgets, they snap into panels, and the layout ends where your monitor ends. The most common workaround is buying more monitors. But what happens when you run out of physical space?
Aries took a different approach. It built a trading app where the screen has no edges. Traders drag live charts, Bloomberg, and X feeds onto a canvas and group them by idea: oil in one corner, gold in another, equities further along, whatever it is they're trading. If a widget doesn't exist yet, they can use Aries’ AI integration to build one right on the canvas.
“It would have taken us twice as long to build without tldraw,” — Reda Falih, CEO of Aries
The problem
The benchmark for professional trading software is the Bloomberg Terminal, and its depth comes from a vast number of specialized screens. Aries knew it couldn't compete screen for screen.
Instead, Aries decided to build a few core tools well and let traders arrange their own setup around them. That raised a layout problem. A trader following oil, gold, and a basket of stocks needs it all in view, alongside news and social feeds. On a conventional platform, that means a multi-monitor rig and dozens of browser tabs.
Aries' first version was a blank, bounded canvas where traders could place widgets. Traders liked the idea, but the canvas had edges. It needed to be infinite.
Why tldraw
Aries tried other canvas libraries first and considered building its own. Then, the team were introduced to tldraw. A quick proof of concept showed that the SDK had already solved the problems Aries was working through.
The most pressing issue was memory. Every Aries widget streams live market data, and a serious trader might have a hundred of them open. "If you have 100 charts streaming live data, you can run into memory leaks," Reda says.
tldraw supplied the canvas and a way to feed live price updates into it. That left Aries to manage memory for its own widgets rather than for the whole canvas. "We still had to do some work on our side," Reda says. "But once we had the source code, we could build our own tools on top of that.”
“What tldraw has done is build the infrastructure so we don’t have to worry about how the canvas works and can instead focus on building for our customers, reconfiguring the same toolkit across multiple use cases.” — Reda Falih, CEO of Aries
The solution
Aries Infinite looks and feels like Aries, not like a whiteboard. tldraw handles the canvas: panning, zooming, selection, and arranging. Aries built everything that sits on it.
Every tool on the canvas, from price charts to the panel where traders place orders, is a building block Aries made on tldraw. Tools on the same page work together. Pick a stock in your watchlist, and every chart and data panel nearby switches to it. Traders can set up separate pages for different stocks, each with its own layout. Behind the scenes, Aries handles the constant flow of live market data separately from what’s on screen, so the canvas never freezes while prices update.
Traders can bring in all the context they need, using live data, without having to worry about those pesky memory leaks. Industries can be clustered together. Rich media like YouTube, X, podcasts, and livestreams can be dragged onto the board to sit alongside Bloomberg. All users need to do is drag and drop.
When the built-in widgets don't cover something, traders describe what they want and Infinite generates it using tldraw primitives. These AI-spawned widgets pull from finance.dev, Aries' own financial data API, which has more than 500 endpoints, including stock market data going back to the 1950s, lobbying data, and US government spending.
Traders have also used the canvas in ways Aries didn't plan. One early user built a tic-tac-toe game in the middle of their trading setup. Another built a Mario game.
The result is one screen that replaces the multi-monitor rig. "Now you don't need a bunch of screens," Reda says. "You couple the canvas with AI, and you don't need hundreds of tabs open. Everything is in one place."
What's next
Aries is working with partners to build more widgets for the canvas. "You'll be able to drag things built by TradingView, built by Bloomberg, built by the NASDAQ, or built by creators on X," Reda says. "You'll just be able to drag the thing they built onto your canvas."
When that ships, a trader's setup won't be limited to what Aries builds. It will be made of whatever the market builds for it. All if it enabled by tldraw’s underlying SDK.
Want to know more? If you're ready to build your own canvas, get started with the tldraw SDK.
