VALR’s CEO, Farzam Ehsani, On A Mission To Unite Crypto Leaders And Build A Better World

This post is an adaption of an article originally published mpost.

Farzam Ehsani, CEO of the crypto exchange VALR, has called upon everyone in the crypto world to question their values and be more open and honest about what they’re doing, so as to create more unity in the industry as it works towards building a better financial system. 

Ehsani’s comments came during a keynote speech at the Token2049 event in Singapore this week, where he talked about his motivations for creating the VALR exchange platform.

Established in 2018 by Ehsani and his co-founders Badi Sudhakaran and Theo Bohnen, VALR is South Africa’s largest crypto exchange and it’s rapidly accelerating its global footprint. It offers products including spot trading, margin trading, perpetual futures and staking products to more than 900,000 retail customers and over 1,100 institutional customers.

Ehsani said he started VALR because, having originally worked in traditional finance, he quickly became disillusioned with the existing financial system, noting that it remains highly fragmented at a regional level, in contrast to the reality of the world we live in today. 

“The world has moved on with the internet,” he said. “We’re living in a world that truly does recognize the oneness of the human race, but our politics, institutions, and infrastructure haven’t quite caught up.” 

VALR’s overriding mission is to help build a more unified financial system befitting of the reality of the world we live in. According to Ehsani, such a system will recognize the oneness of the human race and provide more benefits to everybody who uses it. 

But VALR cannot do this alone, and it needs the cooperation of others in the crypto industry, he said. For this to happen, builders in the crypto industry must put their moral values above their own interests, he said. 

“I was talking to a former employee yesterday, and his words to me were that “VALR is truly moral”,” Ehsani related. “I asked him, what do you mean by that? And he said, if you look at some of the biggest players in the world right now, the things they’re doing behind the scenes are not what is actually happening before our eyes.” 

An example of this is the concept of “chart maintenance”, which is a specialized service that’s sold to some crypto exchange platforms, enabling them to inflate numbers such as their trade volumes and liquidity. Ehsani said exchanges do this to report numbers that are not representative of reality, so they look more attractive to traders. 

“I’m very proud to say that from day one, we’ve not even done a single cent, or a single satoshi of any kind of volume generation or chart maintenance,” he added. 

The CEO said he has always rejected such tactics, because they would be antithesis to VALR’s values. Rather, he feels that he owes it to his customers to be completely transparent about what VALR is doing, so users can decide for themselves where to trade.

The success of VALR underscores the benefits of such an honest approach. Despite never inflating its trade volumes, the platform has become the largest rand-to-crypto market in the world. Today, it boasts some of the deepest markets in terms of liquidity of any exchange platform, despite never compromising its value set. 

Ehsani urged his audience to question their own values as they interact with the crypto space, pointing out that it’s very easy to get caught up in all of the hype and the limelight, trying to look as if you’re doing something amazing when, in reality, you’re not.

“If you do that, it’s not fair to others and it’s not fair to yourself, and it’s not fair to the world,” Ehsani added. “That’s why we’re trying to ensure we bring a product that’s not only world-class, but representative of reality.” 

The name VALR itself was derived from the word “value”, Ehsani explained, as it underpins who the company’s founders really are. He said he chose “value” because the word is a representation of the things people trade. He and his co-founders chose to drop the “u” and the “e” to show that it’s neither American nor English, but a global platform. 

Ehsani concluded by pointing out that the world is wracked with a tremendous amount of conflict and disunity right now. In the U.S., for example, with the Presidential election coming up, the divisiveness is slowly eating away at the core of American society. By building a superior financial system, he hopes it might be possible to repair some of that disunity. 

“It really does a disservice for us all when we talk about the crypto space versus TradFi and how we’re battling each other,” Ehsani said. “On the contrary, we welcome anybody and everybody who wants to serve humanity to work with us, so we can provide a better financial system for the world. We deserve better and the world deserves better, and we hope you’ll join us in that mission.” 

Risk Disclosure

Trading or investing in crypto assets is risky and may result in the loss of capital as the value may fluctuate.

VALR (Pty) Ltd is a licensed financial services provider (FSP #53308).