Nanoseconds were mentioned in the draft technical standards for MiFID II but industry and scientific feedback was that mandating nanosecond-level sync to UTC is not feasible to mandate given the current state of the art ( and will be for some time).
Common trading protocols like FIX and OUCH do support nanoseconds for time stamps, but the MiFID requirement is in terms of deviation from UTC, so you need to budget and have traceability for the total error between your system, clock, and back to the reference standards - ie UTC(NPL), UTC(NIST) etc.
If you’re doing this properly this can well involve visits to your data centre with portable atomic clocks.
Common trading protocols like FIX and OUCH do support nanoseconds for time stamps, but the MiFID requirement is in terms of deviation from UTC, so you need to budget and have traceability for the total error between your system, clock, and back to the reference standards - ie UTC(NPL), UTC(NIST) etc. If you’re doing this properly this can well involve visits to your data centre with portable atomic clocks.
There’s a really good paper on implementing this from the UK NPL; see https://www.ion.org/publications/abstract.cfm?articleID=1316...