The man behind South Africa’s biggest crypto exchange

Farzam Ehsani is the CEO and co-founder of VALR, South Africa’s biggest cryptocurrency exchange by trading volume.

Ehsani was born in the United States to Iranian parents who had fled the persecution of the Baha’i people in their home country during the 1970s.

He attended primary and high school in Nairobi, Kenya, but returned to the US to study economics at the University of California from 2000 to 2004.

His professional career began at Deloitte Consulting in San Francisco in August 2004, where he was initially appointed as a business analyst.

In July 2006, he became a junior associate at McKinsey and Company in South Africa, where he was later promoted to engagement manager.

He left the firm in April 2011, with the 2008 global financial crisis still fresh in his mind. He felt the need to learn more about the industry and how he could make a real difference in people’s financial well-being.

Ehsani was selected as one of just two people from roughly 1,500 applicants to join Rand Merchant Bank’s Class Of programme in 2012. That was where he was first exposed to Bitcoin and blockchain technology.

After working in various banking divisions, he was appointed the head of blockchain and crypto at Rand Merchant Bank’s fintech unit in 2016.

However, the various governance committees’ reluctance to proceed with some of the division’s ideas led him to start his own cryptocurrency exchange in 2018.

VALR was initially a spot-only crypto exchange but has expanded its product selection substantially to become the largest Africa-based crypto exchange with the widest selection of crypto assets.

Among the many investors that made its expansion possible were Michael Jordaan’s Montegray Capital, major exchange Coinbase, and Pantera Capital, the first US institutional asset manager that focuses solely on blockchain technology.

The company’s seed round in 2019 raised $1.5 million. That was followed by $3.4 million in its series A funding round and $50 million in 2022.

In its last funding round in 2022, VALR was valued at $240 million (R3.7 billion, at the time), over 10 times its valuation in 2020.

In September 2023, the company revealed it had processed $10 billion in crypto trades since its founding five years earlier.

VALR reached a milestone of one million users at the end of 2024, as it accelerated its expansion beyond South Africa.

Around half of its new users were acquired in 2024. While it has seen rapid uptake abroad, roughly three-quarters of its total user base are South African.

The company also has roughly 1,100 corporate and institutional clients.

Ehsani believes that VALR’s success is down to being a phenomenal product at a “very fair” price point.

“If we can’t provide the best product for our customers then we don’t have the right to exist,” he maintains.

“In South Africa specifically, we penetrated the market by providing the widest selection of crypto assets at by far the most competitive price point, with a product that was beautiful and secure.”

“Our Application Programming Interface is among the best in the world, as attested to by our customers, our attention to detail and design in our backend systems and on our user interface is uncompromising, and our focus on securing customer assets and data is unrelenting.”

Ehsani also said that VALR believed in the concept of shared value. “As we do well, so do our customers,” he said.

“We were one of the first, if not the first, spot exchange in the world to institute negative maker fees to pay our market makers for providing liquidity to our exchange.”

“The ethos of shared value with our customers continues to this day in the myriad of campaigns, competitions, rebates and our referral programmes.”

Putting the valour in VALR

Ehsani says his upbringing as a “world citizen” with the notion that all humans are part of the same family is also embedded in his business.

“Given the injustices my parents and family went through in Iran, the promotion of justice and serving my brothers and sisters around the world is at the core of what inspires my actions in life,” Ehsani told the Digital Commonwealth.

“We live in a world that is overrun with injustice. The financial system is no exception.”

“Our firm belief is that long-term value is created on a strong foundation of values — truthfulness, integrity, justice, trustworthiness, to name but a few.”

“Particularly in the crypto asset industry, these values are not just a ‘nice-to-have’, but they determine the companies that survive or sink.”

Ehsani said that being a values-driven company meant that VALR would sometimes sacrifice financial gain for ethics, but that often came with reward.

“We have found over and over again that when short-term financial gain is sacrificed to maintain the values we hold dear, the long-term financial benefits are much larger,” he argued.

Below are a few photos of key highlights in VALR’s growth over the past few years.