02 · ORIGINS
github.com/robinhood/faust: open-sourced 2018
2. Origins: The Faust Engine
2.1 Built Inside Robinhood (2018)
In the late 2010s, Robinhood’s engineering team needed to process billions of real-time events per day, order flow, market data, and application events, using Python, the language their stack was built on. Existing stream processors were built for other ecosystems, so Robinhood’s engineers built their own: a distributed stream-processing library modeled on Kafka Streams, designed for high-throughput, stateful, real-time pipelines. They named it Faust.
2.2 The Open-Sourcing
On July 31, 2018, Robinhood open-sourced Faust. The announcement was shared by co-founder Vlad Tenev himself. The engineers who worked on it spoke about it publicly, Jaren Glover, then working on distributed systems at Robinhood, quote-tweeted the announcement the same day, crediting the project with leveling up his distributed-systems skills. The original repository remains public at github.com/robinhood/faust.
2.3 The Dormant Years
Faust ran inside Robinhood’s production infrastructure and gathered an open-source community of its own. In time, Robinhood moved on from the project and the original repository went quiet. The engine that once processed billions of events a day spent years effectively dormant, maintained by community forks, waiting for a workload worthy of it.
2.4 The Revival (2026)
In July 2026 we revived the engine and pointed it at a new firehose: Robinhood Chain. The same primitives that once streamed Robinhood’s internal events now consume the chain’s raw event stream, block by block, in real time. Six autonomous agents built on those primitives classify everything the chain does. FAUST Protocol is an independent project. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to Robinhood Markets.