Note: Sample case study — request the full anonymized PDF.
Client snapshot
A regulated European sports betting operator with an established sportsbook product looking to add a peer-to-peer exchange alongside the book. The commercial thesis was that exchange margin on the high-volume markets — football match odds, tennis, horse racing — would offset the engineering cost within the first year. Operator name anonymized.
The challenge
The operator had a working sportsbook on a licensed engine and a relationship with a tier-one odds feed provider. They did not have any of the exchange-specific infrastructure: an order book, a matching engine, a commission and settlement model that worked for back-and-lay rather than fixed-odds, or the trading tools that an exchange's risk team needs to manage liquidity rather than price.
The additional constraint was that the exchange had to share a single wallet and KYC posture with the existing sportsbook. Players were not going to tolerate a separate registration and a separate balance. Compliance was not going to tolerate a parallel KYC pipeline with a different audit trail.
The approach
We built the exchange in three layers. The bottom layer was the matching engine — a deterministic, fully audited order book per market with strict ordering guarantees and full event sourcing for replay. The middle layer was the exchange business logic — commission calculation, lay liability checks, market suspension on event triggers from the feed, and lay-off integration with a third-party liquidity provider for markets where in-house liquidity was thin in the early months. The top layer was the trader-facing console and the player-facing UI, both wired into the existing wallet and KYC services on the sportsbook side.
We built the matching engine in isolation first and ran it against a replay of historical exchange data from public sources for several weeks before connecting it to a single live market.
Tech stack
Matching engine in Rust, single-writer per market, event-sourced to a durable log. Business logic services in Go. Trader console and player UI in React. Odds and event feed integration with the operator's existing tier-one provider. Wallet and KYC integration with the operator's existing sportsbook services through a thin adapter layer.
Outcomes
The exchange shipped on time. It passed certification in the operator's primary jurisdiction. It scaled cleanly through its first major sporting weekend, with the matching engine handling peak load well within headroom. The shared-wallet integration with the existing sportsbook worked end to end without separate registration friction for players.
Services used
Sports exchange development, iGaming API integration for the wallet and feed wiring, licensing and compliance work for the exchange certification, and security audit and penetration testing on the matching engine and order book before launch.
If you are a sportsbook operator looking at adding an exchange alongside your book, this is the build to talk to Sudonex about.
Matching engine architecture
An exchange lives or dies on the matching engine, so it was built and proven in isolation before anything else connected to it. The design is single-writer per market: one deterministic process owns the order book for a given market, which removes whole classes of race condition and makes the book replayable. Every order, match, cancellation and suspension is event-sourced to a durable log, so any state can be reconstructed exactly — essential for dispute resolution and for the regulator's audit expectations. Before it saw a live bet, the engine ran for several weeks against a replay of historical exchange data from public sources to validate ordering, partial fills and commission calculation under real market shapes.
Results in context
The commercial thesis required the exchange to share one wallet and one KYC posture with the existing sportsbook, and it did — through a thin adapter rather than a parallel pipeline, so players saw no second registration and compliance saw one audit trail. Scaling cleanly through the first major sporting weekend, with the matching engine well inside its load headroom, is the outcome that proved the single-writer design under peak concurrency. Lay-off integration with a third-party liquidity provider covered the thin early markets until in-house liquidity built up.
What transfers to sportsbook operators
If you are bolting an exchange onto a book, the two decisions that matter are proving the matching engine against historical replay before it touches money, and sharing wallet and KYC with the book through an adapter rather than duplicating them. Get those right and the exchange is an extension of your product, not a second platform to operate.