OKTO PAYMENTS is a specialized, leading global payment service provider engineered for some of the most demanding e-commerce sectors, including igaming, digital content and creator economy as well as FX & Trading merchants across Latin America and beyond.

Following regulatory developments in Brazil, OKTO PAYMENTS undertook a significant infrastructure transformation designed to support long-term scalability, operational resilience, and future growth in the region.

As part of this modernization journey, OKTO PAYMENTS collaborated with TigerBeetle to strengthen its ledger and real-time balance infrastructure.

Today, TigerBeetle supports the company’s scalable and resilient financial operations, enabling real-time balance management, operational consistency, and readiness for future market growth opportunities.

OKTO Payments Hackathon in Greece, 2025

Building Resilient Financial Infrastructure at Scale

Leading the infrastructure transformation, Kalebi Serafim and the engineering team focused on building a modern financial operations foundation capable of supporting increasing transaction volumes, operational consistency, and high availability.

For OKTO PAYMENTS, implementing the right ledger infrastructure was a critical part of ensuring resilience, scalability, and financial consistency.

“TigerBeetle matched our requirements around predictability, resilience, and real-time balance management. It gave us the flexibility to design the operational controls and financial workflows required for a modern payments environment.”

Building and scaling real-time transaction processing infrastructure requires careful consideration around consistency, resilience, availability, and operational reliability. Kalebi elaborates on some considerations that shaped the decision-making process:

1. General-Purpose Databases Were Not Designed for OLTP

With TigerBeetle, debit/credit is enforced in the database; the schema of OLTP is built-in and ready to use, saving time and errors. TigerBeetle’s double-entry data model means foundational logic doesn't need to be implemented (or tested) as it would when building a ledger on top of a general-purpose (OLGP) database.

“TigerBeetle brings the necessary capabilities from day one. When you are integrating with it, you are able to build operational controls and reconciliation mechanisms in a very controlled way. The platform allowed us to build specifically around our operational and scalability requirements while maintaining flexibility for future growth. TigerBeetle also provides the API capabilities required to build additional controls and workflows on top of the ledger infrastructure.”

2. Immutability and the Ability to “Correct History” Can Coexist

Maintaining operational consistency and preserving a transparent financial audit trail were important considerations throughout the infrastructure design process. Some database management systems provision for bitemporality, while others don’t.

TigerBeetle's immutability-by-design coupled with the option to correct transfers, preserving the financial state’s full audit trail, was critical for Kalebi and team.

“Controlling system state through the ledger helps ensure operational consistency and provides a strong foundation for financial operations as the business continues to scale.”

3. Availability and Durability Require Replication

TigerBeetle is designed for high availability and durability. With six replicas across the infrastructure in multiple zones, if one fails, the other replicas remain the source of truth. Failures at the infrastructure level, like an outage, no longer introduce a chance to lose data.

“I sleep well at night knowing that the platform is designed with the resilience and replication capabilities required to support operational continuity at scale. With six replicas across the infrastructure, the architecture gives us the confidence that operations can continue running smoothly while maintaining consistency and data integrity.”

OKTO Payments Hackathon in Brazil, 2025

Self-hosting vs. TigerBeetle Cloud

Kalebi and team chose to work with TigerBeetle as operators, deploying TigerBeetle Cloud:

1. Separation of Concerns

Kalebi considered different infrastructure approaches to achieve strong operational controls and governance, evaluating various models around access management and financial state integrity before concluding that TigerBeetle was the best fit, combining performance with structured operational controls.

“Having the right controls and separation around ledger infrastructure was an important requirement for us. TigerBeetle gave us the ability to build a strong and reliable operational foundation around balance management.”

Deploying with TigerBeetle Cloud ensured strict separation around ledger infrastructure and financial state management, providing a single authoritative system of record that is observable and immutable.

“If someone wants to see a transaction or balance, the ledger acts as the operational source of truth across the platform.”

2. Direct Access to Expertise, 24/7

Kalebi wanted to leverage the collective knowledge of TigerBeetle’s engineers on an ongoing and direct basis, while eliminating delays in case of operational incidents or infrastructure optimization requirements (i.e., mechanisms for managing lagging replicas, latency spike resolution, zero downtime upgrades).

“TigerBeetle engineers worked closely with our teams throughout the implementation journey and continue to be available and engaged, supporting optimization, operational improvements and the ongoing evolution of the platform.”

3. Cost Efficiency

The cost of self-hosting versus TigerBeetle Cloud was evaluated from both an operational and long-term scalability perspective.

“The managed infrastructure approach provided operational efficiency while allowing the team to remain focused on platform innovation and future growth initiatives.”

TigerBeetle Cloud means that replication, operational correctness, and failure handling are all managed directly by the TigerBeetle team.

International Growth, Multi-currency, and Real-Time Balances

For OKTO PAYMENTS in Brazil, future growth lies in continued diversification, platform innovation, and delivering seamless payments experiences across evolving digital environments.

Kalebi believes TigerBeetle will play an important role in supporting the company’s expansion across Latin America, including multi-currency capabilities that enable operations across countries with a single source of truth for reconciliation. Real-time balance visibility across markets will also be a key advantage as the platform continues to scale.

“TigerBeetle provides performance, balance control, reliability, scalability, and resilience, required for modern financial operations. The platform provides a strong infrastructure foundation that enables us to continue evolving, scaling, and supporting future innovation with confidence.”

Some of Okto's engineering team, 2025