Edward Smyshliaiev, Chief Technology Officer at GR8 Tech, explains why platform speed has become the defining battleground in modern betting technology and how a radical new approach to performance could set a new industry benchmark.
What excites you most about GR8 Tech’s roadmap right now? What new capabilities are you most excited to bring to clients this year?
My top one is that we have a goal to create the fastest platform in the world – fastest in terms of everything: front-end speed, back-end speed, deposits, withdrawals. Our roadmap is shaped to make us one of the fastest platforms on the market.
It’s been going very nicely so far. We’ve started to adopt new technologies that no one else on the market is using right now. Our early system results already show we’re at least 8x faster compared to our previous baseline; in comparison to top rivals, we’re seeing cases of 2-3x better performance. We’re trying to close the gap where we’re slower, so that by the end of the year, we’ll be significantly better.
Our main focus is performance, efficiency, and speed. And I may talk about this a lot now, but let’s circle back to it at the end of the year and discuss results.
Many tech providers speak of making solutions faster on both the front end and the back end. Why has speed become such a critical battleground in modern betting technology?
The world is getting faster. Players are getting faster, too. We used to have YouTube and 1.5-hour videos, and now it’s TikTok and effective storytelling in six seconds. People are much better at using technology and much worse at maintaining attention spans. We see that the players may be playing three slots at once.
They’re placing multiple bets across the system, and it’s crucial for them to place a bet as fast as imaginably possible. They also want deposits and withdrawals as fast as possible, within seconds.
Eight years ago, at another company, deposits took around 15 minutes, and it was sometimes considered best-in-market in certain regions, like Thailand. Now we’re talking about 15 seconds not being enough; even five seconds, which used to be considered acceptable and a great target, isn’t enough anymore. So we really need to do it in one or two seconds. That’s our target.
We can see how important it is for players and consequently for the operators: when deposits become faster, retention improves, the number of players increases, and overall metrics keep growing as we get faster.
When we say “faster,” what exactly do you mean – milliseconds, workflows, integrations…?
Everything. We have five sets of metrics we’ve developed and want to improve to become best-in-class across all of them.That includes the front end: how fast the website loads, how quickly the mobile app opens, how fast you get your content, and how rapidly it becomes usable. And with a slow back end, you can’t have a fast front end, so it all works together.
At the same time, we’re talking about product metrics like delivery speed, settlement speed, bet acceptance speed, game launch, and casino wins – there, we’re looking at milliseconds.
And finally, payments are critical: deposit speed and withdrawal speed. For fiat processing, we’re measuring in seconds. For crypto, the blockchain confirmation time depends on the network itself, but what we control – detecting the transaction and crediting the player’s balance – that’s where we’re pushing for maximum on our side.
From an operator’s point of view, how does platform speed translate into real commercial advantage?
Oh, big time. We can see it in our metrics: as soon as our platform improves in a certain region, let’s say by 20 per cent in performance, even just on the front end, we see retention improving. Player loyalty to the platform improves, too. They place more bets, they place bets more often, and they return more, becoming loyal customers.
On the front-end side, what are the main areas GR8 Tech is improving to make the user experience smoother and faster? How much does page load time and responsiveness influence player behaviour?
Page load time and responsiveness directly impact player retention and engagement. If a page loads slowly, players leave. If bet placement lags, they get frustrated. So this year, we’re making a huge leap to become one of the fastest platforms in the world.
We’re adopting a new technology (I’ll leave the specifics for reveals in the case studies) that avoids main thread blocking. It’s a completely different approach from current front-end frameworks on the market, which mostly follow the same “waterfall/streaming” approach to loading content to the device, especially visible on mobile – and right now, in certain markets, about 95 per cent of casino and sports players are using mobile devices.
So we’re building the front end, which is absolutely new to the market and not many big companies are adopting today. We decided to ensure all front-end metrics – load speed, smoothness, everything – will be best-in-class.We’ll be deploying this gradually. First clients will receive an update already in March, and then we’ll have automatic rollouts and improvements. So it won’t be a one-time delivery.
In March, we expect a speed boost of at least 20-40 per cent, and it will keep increasing each month.
What role does personalisation play in front-end speed – can tailored experiences actually feel faster to the user?
As a rule of thumb, the more personalisation you have, the more performance degradation you can expect on the front end.
Here’s why: in essence, personalisation creates various builds of the platform and/or more complex architecture. Our platform was initially designed to let the operator change literally anything, create any kind of layouts for different player segments.
We ran analytics and found that, for some brands, there are around 3,000 different layouts, automatically generated through segmentation and configuration in their back end. No developer involved, just the operator ticking a box in the CMS. They can create anything to their liking.
A very convenient capability, but it also creates a huge technical challenge. Maintaining performance gets tricky: how do you approach caching, builds, and so on? The whole market faces this trade-off. We found a shortcut that lets us achieve both: keep full customisation capabilities while still advancing toward our main goal of becoming the fastest platform.
The operator changes something, and in seconds it’s already on the front end and applied to the player. No trade-off between speed and flexibility – we’re proving you can have both.
AI is now a core part of every technology conversation. Where do you see AI having the biggest impact on platform performance?
One of them would be the so-called “copiloting” things – both for players and the operators. Imagine a built-in chatbot much like ChatGPT that helps with various actions across the platform. Let’s say a player is trying to find a good tournament to bet on.
AI can give them info on what’s going on with the team or specific players, what events are happening today, what’s trending, and maybe even place the bet automatically from the chat window.
So instead of navigating and trying to find everything on the website, you can just use a chatbot. Same with operators. We have hundreds of different bonuses and configuration options, and managing all of that takes time.
We have an AI assistant integrated – it already exists to a certain extent, though it’s not yet making changes as you ask. That’s where we want to improve: “Create a new type of bonus for this player segment,” and the AI does it for you.
We can see a huge boost there, because operators will need less time spent on operations in man-hours. It becomes easier to use a platform that can be configured in seconds, just in a text window. And for players, it gives more convenience and freedom, saves time, and also impacts retention.
How are you preparing for the massive traffic spikes that global events like the 2026 World Cup will bring?
We’ve had World Cups before, more than once, so we know we’re ready. We still perform regular performance checks and stress tests; in fact, we’re currently running one. We’re making sure we identify any new bottlenecks we might have in our system, but we’re seeing none – so far, so good.
The last big spike of traffic on our platform was during Usyk vs Dubois 2 in 2025 – a match close to our hearts since we are partners in tech with Usyk’s Ready to Fight initiative. There was a massive surge, but we had no degradation whatsoever. It went smoothly. So we don’t expect anything bad to happen during the World Cup, we’re fully ready.
And what do you do when something stops working on the platform?
I’m trying to recall incidents like that. Of course, it’s tech, and some things may happen, but we have a great engineering team. We have people online all the time: tech support, infrastructure, and developers – on duty and on shift.
We do proactive monitoring: all our systems are covered with metrics and monitoring. So as soon as something goes wrong, we have tools in place to roll back and fix it immediately, before the customer even notices there were any issues. So, the same as with the World Cup, we are 100 per cent prepared for surprises.
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Edward Smyshliaiev, Chief Technology Officer at GR8 Tech, explains why platform speed has become the defining battleground in modern betting technology and how a radical new approach to performance could set a new industry benchmark. What excites you most about GR8 Tech’s roadmap right now? What new capabilities are you most excited to bring to…
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