“Your Sports Data Feed Is a Black Box”. B1 (Be One) CTO on the Infrastructure Problem Nobody Talks About

Speed, resilience, transparency — the words every provider uses, but few can back up. In this exclusive interview, B1 CTO Michael Cheremuhin opens up the infrastructure behind Sports Data Feed and explains, in technical detail, why the industry's black box problem is still unsolved — and what B1 built to change that.

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B1 Sports Data Feed delivers sub-200ms latency. What's actually behind that number?

We take latency personally. Our team spent years building high-load systems before B1, so when we designed the platform, the question wasn't 'how do we make it fast' — it was 'what can we throw out of the hot path.'

The answer is simple: don't spend time on things that don't matter. A price update from our trading has exactly one job — reach the client. So the delivery path is a set of small, fast modules on top of a very fast broker. Nothing else lives there. Recovery data lives separately. The client console lives separately. And every client is fully isolated from every other client — which keeps things fast and lets us customize each integration without touching anyone else.

Our target is trading to clients in under 100 milliseconds. Today the average is under 200ms. And it's not just the feed — our bet validation responds in under 30 milliseconds, so the operator's player never waits on us. Here's how seriously we take it: at 150ms, support and the dev team get an alert. At 180ms, that alert wakes the dev team up. At 200ms, it wakes me up. At 250ms, the whole C-level knows.

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Sports data infrastructure is often described as a "black box" — operators plug in and hope for the best. How did you build something that's both high-performance and fully transparent?

Our architecture is about two things: maximum speed and maximum resilience.

Speed I've already covered — small modules, fast broker, nothing extra in the delivery path, full client isolation. Transparency comes almost for free from that design. Because each client has their own dedicated pipeline, we can show them exactly what they receive and why. No shared black box. No 'it depends.'

On resilience — we're a bit paranoid, honestly. We don't rely on datacenter reliability, because everything goes down eventually. Even Twitter goes down. So every critical component has a live backup. If some crazy day part of the internet disappears, we switch to backup clusters in 15 seconds.

And we're not bragging about that number. We genuinely think we can do better. That's the challenge that drives us.

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Integration has always been a manual, time-consuming process. How did it change the way operators integrate with B1?

For us, integration is not 'here are the docs, good luck'.

It starts the moment we meet a client. When a new lead comes in, our dev team and sales sit down together and plan how this specific integration should launch. What do they already have? What content do they need? What's their team — a big project where every dev hour is precious, or an AI startup moving fast? We've integrated everything into everything, so we know how to make it profitable for the business. Every integration is its own little startup for us.

Short on resources? We start with a quick dev intro call so every hour of your team's time is used well. Integrating with AI? Good — we're an AI-native company. Part of our services was built entirely with AI, and our internal project — the Brain, our shared AI context — is partially open to clients during integration. Real data, real logic. Not a PDF from two versions ago.

Every week starts with the same question: how do we solve the integration problem in iGaming — because right now, that's the problem. We even have an internal joke name for our AI integrator. The concept is simple: one day to integrate, a good night's sleep, one day to validate — production.

Why can we promise that? Because our bet validation system is your safety net. Whatever risk management doesn't catch, our trading and integration support team does. We're focused on our client's profit — the better our clients do, the more crazy experiments we can afford.

Margin control, bet validation, risk oversight — operators have been handling these separately forever. How does B1 decide to change that?

We don't turn features into marketing — we start from what the operator actually needs.

Need granular margin control? That's what customization templates are built for. Need to switch a market off instantly — without opening a support ticket? One click in the console.

But here's what we learned from doing so many integrations: the real pain is the gap between business and development. Business says 'we want to add this content.' Development says 'we have no idea what that means in the feed.'

So our console is built directly on the data structures of our feed. Market types, every structure the client sees — what you see in the console UI is exactly what arrives in your data streams. No translation layer. No surprises.

Speed and ease of integration is our number one priority. The console is part of that promise.

Operators can't afford downtime. How did you build infrastructure that treats reliability as a product feature, not a promise?

Honestly, reliability isn't a separate feature for us — it's baked into everything I've already described. It's the alert that wakes me up at 200 milliseconds. It's the backup cluster that takes over in 15 seconds when a datacenter has a bad day. It's the bet validation that backs up every integration, and the trading and support team behind that. We don't promise reliability in an SLA paragraph — we build it as behavior of the system. And then we keep raising the bar on ourselves.

Downtime isn't something we hope to avoid. It's something we've designed for, drilled, and gotten a little obsessed with. Our clients can't afford downtime — so we decided we can't either.

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ABOUT B1 (BE ONE):

B1 (Be One) is a B2B product-focused iGaming company, shaping AI-driven content and real-time sports data infrastructure.

Website: https://b1.global/ai-cricket
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/b1global/?viewAsMember=true

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