Two Betting Platforms, One Lesson: The Database Matters

In betting and gaming, growth is rarely gradual.

Traffic spikes around major sporting events. Millions of real-time transactions hit your platform at once, and every one of them has to be correct. When the database falters, the consequences aren’t abstract. Revenue stops. Players lose trust. Regulators start asking questions.

Yet many betting and gaming platforms are still built on databases that weren’t designed for this reality. Monolithic architectures, manual sharding, and fragile failover strategies turn growth into risk. Teams spend more time keeping systems upright than improving the player experience.

This is why more betting and gaming companies are rethinking their data foundation, and why distributed SQL is becoming the new standard.

At RoachFest 2025, two fast-growing operators, Newton and Kaizen Gaming, shared how they rebuilt their platforms on CockroachDB to scale globally, absorb extreme traffic spikes, and protect player trust without ballooning operational complexity. Their stories highlight what’s possible when your database is built to scale when others fail and why, in a high-stakes industry, the right data architecture can become a competitive advantage, not just an IT decision.

Newton: Betting on scale without betting the business

Newton is a global betting and gaming platform built with one key goal: high-value player experiences by design. Since its founding in 2009, gaming has shifted online with companies adopting different technologies. So in 2018, Newton started building a new platform. Starting in Romania and expanding across Europe and Africa, Newton needed infrastructure that could keep up with:

• Lean, global operations

• Real-time data synchronization

• High concurrency & scale

• Reliability and consistency even with spiky transactions

• Doing more with less – adding new markets without adding more headcount

CockroachDB became a foundational enabler of that strategy.

The benefit for Newton: Newton uses CockroachDB to deliver real-time, always-available player journeys at global scale, even during peak betting events. The platform handles sudden spikes in concurrent users without downtime, protecting revenue during the moments that matter most.

Newton chose CockroachDB because:

• Effortless global expansion: CockroachDB behaves as one database cluster spanning multiple regions, Europe or Africa

• Built-in replication & resilience: multi-active architecture keeps players online

• Horizontal scalability made easy: CockroachDB automatically balances load and data across nodes

• PostgreSQL-compatibility: allowed developers to leverage existing skills, simple to migrate over

For Newton, distributed SQL isn’t about database innovation for its own sake, it aligned with their automation-first mindset, and supported a balance of innovation and reliability to support their international scale. It’s about doing more with less, expanding faster than competitors, and keeping the player experience intact as the business grows.

Kaizen Gaming: Protecting player trust at massive scale

Kaizen Gaming operates one of the fastest-growing betting and gaming platforms in the world, with more than 13 million active users across 19 countries. The speed with which Kaizen Gaming has grown has led to scalability challenges, including managing different regulatory requirements. The key metric has always been player trust. Trust is both hard to build and easy to lose.

The team noticed their legacy architecture was struggling under load. When examining their incidents, the largest category (41%) were related to the database. CockroachDB offered Kaizen a cleaner path forward.

The benefit for Kaizen Gaming: CockroachDB enables Kaizen to scale transaction-heavy, trust-sensitive workloads predictably, while simplifying operations for both developers and operators.

Key outcomes include:

• Strong consistency and ACID guarantees at global scale. ACID-compliant transactions ensure wallets, bets, and payouts are always correct — a non-negotiable requirement for player trust.

• Predictable scale. In performance testing, Kaizen scaled from hundreds of thousands to over 800,000 inserts per minute by adding nodes, without re-architecting or introducing operational risk.

• Seamless horizontal scaling: No need for manual sharding, and auto-rebalancing manages load throughout the deployment

• Operational confidence. Failover, upgrades, and rebalancing occur without taking systems offline, allowing Kaizen to run maintenance without impacting customers.

• A true partnership. Fast onboarding, responsive support, and rapid delivery of requested features gave Kaizen confidence they could scale long-term with Cockroach Labs.

For Kaizen Gaming, CockroachDB isn’t just a database upgrade. It’s a way to sleep better at night, knowing the platform can handle growth without compromising trust, even when traffic surges and the stakes are high.

Why this matters for betting and gaming companies

Both Newton and Kaizen Gaming highlight the same underlying truth: In betting and gaming, scale, correctness, and availability are inseparable from revenue and trust.

Distributed SQL and CockroachDB specifically gives operators a way to:

• Scale globally without manual sharding

• Survive traffic spikes without downtime

• Maintain strict consistency for real-money transactions

• Expand into new markets faster, while meeting regulations with fewer operational risks

For companies betting their business on growth, CockroachDB helps ensure the database isn’t the weakest link when it matters most.