Farzam Ehsani on Why VALR Sacrifices Money for Values

From a bank window to Africa's largest crypto platform: how VALR started

VALR began with a moment of discomfort at a bank desk. Ehsani was the blockchain lead at RMB, part of the FirstRand group, when he looked out of his office window and asked himself whether he would be proud of the trajectory he was on. His answer was no. "I don't believe my life is about being comfortable, and just kind of taking care of myself with a nice salary," he told the audience. He had been building blockchain work inside the bank, but after a governance committee responded coldly to the project's progress, he treated it as a signal. On his first day back from paternity leave, more than eight years ago, he submitted his resignation.

The company he went on to build now spans buying, selling, staking, margin trading, perpetual futures, lending, borrowing and payments through VALR Pay. It has grown from a single product, the ability to buy and sell Bitcoin, to over 100 assets. Ehsani reported roughly 1.7 million users, of which 650,000 are fully KYC'd, and around 2,000 corporate and institutional customers. Revenue splits about evenly, with 50% from retail and 50% from those institutional clients. Daily trading volume runs between roughly $25 million and $45 million, and closer to $100 million a day once the OTC desk is included. Crucially, and unusually for a scaling startup, VALR is profitable. "We are indeed profitable," Ehsani said, before adding that profit is not the aim: "our aim is actually growth at the moment."

Stablecoins, USDC minting and a European business most people miss

The part of VALR that surprises people sits in Europe, not South Africa. About 75% of VALR's customers are South African and 25% come from around the world. The company is licensed in South Africa and out of Poland, is close to licences in Malta and the Cayman Islands, and had initial approval from VARA in Dubai before putting that on hold pending a change of licence. Out of its European operation, Ehsani said, VALR is, on Circle's own numbers, one of the top 10 minters of USDC globally and the largest minter out of Europe.

Minting, he explained, is the mechanism that lets dollars leave the traditional banking system and become a stablecoin on-chain, a token backed roughly one-to-one by a dollar or a US Treasury bond and designed to mimic the dollar. The appeal is speed and cost. Global finance, Ehsani argued, has been "a game of, kind of, you execute and you wait," sometimes hours, sometimes weeks. VALR has waited weeks for customer funds to land. Stablecoins collapse that to seconds or minutes at a fraction of the price. Two of the largest money remitters in Africa already use VALR's crypto infrastructure to offer stablecoin-based savings accounts, and Ehsani signalled that three of South Africa's largest banks and its largest asset managers will soon be powered by the same rails.

Why VALR wants regulation, but not the regulation we have

Ehsani is a regulated-exchange CEO who believes the current rulebook is out of date. His central argument is that crypto is the first digital asset that can be held by an individual without an intermediary, and that laws written for a world of bank-held balances have not caught up. He is emphatic that the intent behind regulation is right: he does not want to facilitate money laundering, terrorist financing or dark-web flows, and says VALR runs compliance, fraud and financial-crimes departments precisely to keep illicit money off the platform. The problem, in his view, is cost and effectiveness. "There is a lot of regulation that adds cost for society," he said, "but that doesn't stop the malicious actors." He singled out KYC as a burden borne by society that needs reinventing, pointing to mule accounts as evidence that knowing the end customer does not, on its own, stop bad actors.

His answer is not deregulation but calibration. VALR wants activity that currently happens "in the shadows," on peer-to-peer channels where scamming and fraud are rife, to move onto a regulated, centralised venue where customers are protected. He is proud that VALR has KYC'd every customer since day one, that no one has traded "a single cent" on the platform anonymously, and that in more than eight years the company has never received a regulatory fine.

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Founding lessons: comfort with failure, cold outreach and a $50m round

The most transferable part of the conversation was Ehsani's account of how a founder actually gets started and funded. His biggest barrier, he said, was not liquidity or regulation but a fear of failing, the legacy of a career of A's and not failing. The unlock was accepting that failure was survivable: "if I fail, it will be okay," and if it came to it, he would "go and flip burgers" to support his family. On the practical side, he deliberately did not over-analyse. "If I had thought like that, I wouldn't have done it," he said of the stacked barriers, choosing instead to first prove the platform could work and solve liquidity and regulation as the time came.

Funding came early and through outreach that many founders avoid. VALR's first seed investor, whose name in the transcript is unconfirmed, backed the company about six weeks in, before there was a product to demo, after reading a paper Ehsani had written called "The Advent of Crypto Banking" and reaching out on Twitter. The lesson Ehsani drew was blunt: reach out cold, by email or LinkedIn or Twitter, and get comfortable with rejection. Warm introductions through mutual connections remain the strongest, but cold outreach yields results. When VALR raised $50 million in 2022, "many, many, many people said no," he recalled, even though the round was ultimately oversubscribed.

Bitcoin, payments and the financial institution VALR wants to become

Ehsani's long-term thesis is that VALR will not be a crypto exchange forever. The exchange, he said, was "just the entry point" to building "a financial institution of the future" covering money storage, transfer, exchange, provision and protection, done "quicker, cheaper, better" than incumbent banks. The near-term roadmap is payments and geography. VALR is building out a payments business, is a registered third-party payments provider, and pointed to Kenya's new regulatory regime as the next market to open. On retail spending, Ehsani said over 700,000 merchants in South Africa already accept crypto, and that a customer can pay for groceries at Pick n Pay or buy plane tickets through VALR Pay today, with settlement infrastructure layered on top so no one waits for a block to be mined.

On Bitcoin itself, VALR runs what Ehsani called an "OG DAT" strategy, a digital-asset-treasury approach in which the company holds the Bitcoin it earns in fees and spends its rand reserves on operating costs. He remains bullish, recalling a 2017 radio appearance when Bitcoin sat at 60,000 rand and a listener called his optimism irresponsible. Bitcoin has since risen more than 15 times over, to above $60,000, though he noted it was still down 50% from its peak at the time of the interview. His verdict: Bitcoin will not stay range-bound, it will either go to zero or "far, far higher," and he does not believe it is going to zero.

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Is VALR profitable, and how big is it?

Yes, VALR is profitable, which Ehsani described as a fortunate but deliberately secondary position. The company reported roughly 1.7 million users, 650,000 of them fully KYC'd, and around 2,000 corporate and institutional customers, with revenue split evenly between retail and institutions. Daily trading volume runs between about $25 million and $45 million, rising to around $100 million a day including OTC flows. Ehsani stressed that growth, not profit, is the current aim, and that VALR sits on a large balance sheet, part of it held in Bitcoin, that it wants to deploy cautiously into growth rather than spend for the sake of it.

What are stablecoins and what does minting mean?

A stablecoin is a token on a blockchain that is backed roughly one-to-one by a real-world asset, typically a US dollar in a bank account or a US Treasury bond, and is designed to mimic the dollar on-chain. The two largest are USDT, issued by Tether, and USDC, issued by Circle. Minting, in Ehsani's explanation, is the act of taking dollars out of the traditional banking system and converting them into a stablecoin on-chain, with redeeming the reverse. The value, he argued, is that stablecoins let money move across borders in seconds or minutes at a fraction of the cost and delay of correspondent banking, which is why African remitters are already using VALR's rails to build savings products.

Why did a comfortable banker leave to build a crypto startup?

Ehsani left RMB because he concluded he would be disappointed in himself if he stayed for the comfort of a good salary without testing his full capacity or trying to improve the financial system. He was the bank's blockchain lead and had hoped to build within it, but a cold governance-committee response convinced him the bank was not ready, and he resigned on his first day back from paternity leave. The deeper enabler, in his telling, was making peace with failure and with the fear of others' judgement, which freed him to give the idea a shot with only a few months of personal runway.