The global payment rails are built in a USD-centric way, which means south-south money transfers often suffer greater friction and more delays. Tony is here to solve this trillion dollar problem with Vi.Fi; making doing business on the African continent easy as doing business anywhere.

I caught up with Virtual Finance (ViFi) Co-Founder Tony Olendo on Monday for the very first Founders Unrolled — a series where I sit down with founders to dig into their personal journeys, the gaps they’re filling, and their views on the future of Web3.

ViFi is the stablecoin aggregator in emerging markets that makes remittance frictionless.

“So I've been involved in technology for over 15 years. I started building mobile apps a very long time ago. I was involved in the early tech ecosystem in Kenya.”

“I consulted for startups there for quite some time; it wasn’t until 2017 that I started looking at crypto – I was actually looking to solve the problems ViFi solves before getting into crypto, and the tech behind crypto and blockchain stood out as the way to do it.”

“In 2014 I got married, and I moved to Trinidad and Tobago. As soon as I moved there, I had a family emergency and needed to send money back home to Kenya. But the global financial system just wasn’t built for south-to-south transactions.”

“I submitted my transaction to the local bank, but it kept getting rejected. After weeks of back and forth, they said that it was accepted. My account was debited, but my family didn't receive the funds for a very long time.”

“In fact, they never receive them – it is still a dispute that continues with the bank. And so I had to then go through a friend who lived in the U.S. I sent money to him, and then they sent the money to Kenya.”

“That’s when it hit me — this system doesn’t work for us. It’s broken.”

“When I first started looking at crypto in 2017. We made a bet on Stellar at first because it seemed to solve the problem. But crypto wasn’t ready. We couldn’t raise funds, so I went back to traditional tech.”

“I kept watching the market though, and in 2021, I started writing smart contracts again. I worked with Coordinape, and later joined Polygon and worked my way up to lead dev rel engineer.”

“And that is where I came to the realization, having lived in emerging markets for a considerable period of time, that the way people are using crypto in the western world is vastly different from the way people back home used it.”

“The potential of what this technology actually represented was very far removed. Especially when it came to the cycles in the midst of like the heights of like DeFi summer in 2020, and then the NFT craze picked up — you look at actual real use cases within that and they were very few and far between.”

“That’s when I saw the opportunity more clearly — emerging markets were using crypto as a lifeline, not just speculation. But the tools were being built for the speculators, there was a large gap in tools and financial systems being developed for those that needed them in emerging markets.”

“The financial rails just aren’t built for emerging markets.”

“In the West, you can link your bank to a wallet and move money seamlessly. But in places like Kenya, you’re stuck dealing with P2P traders and OTC desks just to get money on-chain.”

“This fragmentation slows businesses down. For example, I spoke to a manufacturer in Kenya running at 30% capacity — not because they lacked capital or labor, but because they couldn’t get USD to import raw materials.”

“Even big companies can’t get their money out. In the traditional banking system, when you actually go and deposit US dollars, the reality is that US dollars are not yours anymore. It doesn't belong to you. When you actually come to lay a claim on it and say, ‘I want to wire it back to my country,’ the bank says ‘well, you can't really do that, and we could only give you a fraction of that over a spread out period of time.”

“The main thing we’re solving is for the OTC desks – they're actually constrained by two things, the best price and deep liquidity. For example, if a business gets a client and the client wants $3 million today, they could get a request for $3 million in one day – it'll take them that whole day to be able to actually aggregate all of that liquidity – and the person may actually get the funds two days after the initial request.”

“If you have a decentralized protocol that allows them to be able to move efficiently in and out of local fiat, then you enable them to process much larger volumes right away – when cash flow isn’t tied up in FX delays, businesses can operate at full capacity.”

“The FX market in Africa and Latin America alone is worth $540 billion a year. But most of that happens off-chain, and it’s messy and expensive.”

“In Nigeria, the daily FX volume is about $800 million. If we capture even 1% of that, we’re looking at $3 million a day — almost $900 million a year — in fees. And that’s just one market.”

“When you bring a stablecoin on-chain, you bring the entire economy on-chain”

“You can issue government bonds, build lending markets, and attract foreign investors — all on crypto rails.”

“In Kenya alone returns on government bonds are roughly between 12 to 18 percent. You might ask, well, who cares about these government bonds? Who's actually buying it? Well, the Harvard Endowment Fund is buying local government bonds, the Saudi Sovereign Wealth Fund, and many sovereign wealth funds.”

“All of these funds are able to commit, say, at least 5% of their portfolio to exotic bonds, and they're able to get returns on it in a way that offsets any kind of risk. The local stablecoin is a step to bring these financial services onchain — with FX rates priced in real-time — that could unlock all different kinds of potential.”

“There’s no such thing as an official USD rate in most emerging markets. The price you get depends on who you know and what banking relationships they have. It’s completely subjective.”

“But in most emerging markets you have the ‘bank rate’ and the ‘street rate’ – or the OTC rate - which can vary significantly. Let’s say you’re in Colombia, and the bank gives you 20 pesos per USD, but the OTC rate is 24 pesos. This is the problem we found with Ripple and Stellar – they give you the bank rate, ViFi trades at the real rate.”

“If everything goes right, in three years, we'd be the global decentral bank. That's the goal.”

“Having deep liquidity for FX markets across different jurisdictions, while also having achieved a lot of the governing values of Ethereum. Having credible decentralization in terms of our governance and ensuring that the protocol is genuinely community-owned and run, while still managing the actual execution from a day-to-day standpoint.”

“At that point, you're looking at over $10 billion in assets under management and $1 billion in daily trading volume. Actively across multiple jurisdictions.”

“Volume is the holy grail. That’s how we measure impact.”

“If we hit $1 billion in trades, that’s $10 million a day in fees. Even if TVL or AUM go down, the scale keeps us profitable.”

“The world doesn’t need more memecoins. It needs tools that solve real problems.”

“Ideally, in a perfect world, we get rid of everything and we have one currency and we figure out how to price it in. But until that day, the reality of currency exchange is essentially asking, ‘how many apples do I need to get an orange?’ Right now, you don't know how many oranges you need to get apples in many emerging economies.”

“ViFi is the on-chain oracle that will be able to say, this is how many oranges are actually required. Because currently, nothing like that exists. And if we’re successful, businesses won’t have to shut down because they can’t get USD. Multinationals won’t have to beg banks for liquidity. We’re fixing the rails — and that opens up everything.”

Emerging markets have long been underserved by the global financial system, but ViFi is paving a path toward a more inclusive, accessible, and transparent future: the Open Economy. Tony and his team are not just solving today’s challenges–they’re building the infrastructure for tomorrow’s opportunities.

By streamlining cross-border capital movement and solving local currency fluctuation issues, this ambition and mission could rewrite the financial playbook for billions.

With products like ViFi, the Open Economy–a world that provides opportunities that might not have been available before–starts to feel less like a dream and more like an inevitability. For Tony Olendo, the journey to building this future is already underway.

I wish I had time to ask why he’s building on Scroll… but we ran out of time…

Follow Tony on Twitter or reach out on LinkedIn.

The global payment rails are built in a USD-centric way, which means south-south money transfers often suffer greater friction and more delays. Tony is here to solve this trillion dollar problem with Vi.Fi; making doing business on the African continent easy as doing business anywhere.

I caught up with Virtual Finance (ViFi) Co-Founder Tony Olendo on Monday for the very first Founders Unrolled — a series where I sit down with founders to dig into their personal journeys, the gaps they’re filling, and their views on the future of Web3.

ViFi is the stablecoin aggregator in emerging markets that makes remittance frictionless.

“So I've been involved in technology for over 15 years. I started building mobile apps a very long time ago. I was involved in the early tech ecosystem in Kenya.”

“I consulted for startups there for quite some time; it wasn’t until 2017 that I started looking at crypto – I was actually looking to solve the problems ViFi solves before getting into crypto, and the tech behind crypto and blockchain stood out as the way to do it.”

“In 2014 I got married, and I moved to Trinidad and Tobago. As soon as I moved there, I had a family emergency and needed to send money back home to Kenya. But the global financial system just wasn’t built for south-to-south transactions.”

“I submitted my transaction to the local bank, but it kept getting rejected. After weeks of back and forth, they said that it was accepted. My account was debited, but my family didn't receive the funds for a very long time.”

“In fact, they never receive them – it is still a dispute that continues with the bank. And so I had to then go through a friend who lived in the U.S. I sent money to him, and then they sent the money to Kenya.”

“That’s when it hit me — this system doesn’t work for us. It’s broken.”

“When I first started looking at crypto in 2017. We made a bet on Stellar at first because it seemed to solve the problem. But crypto wasn’t ready. We couldn’t raise funds, so I went back to traditional tech.”

“I kept watching the market though, and in 2021, I started writing smart contracts again. I worked with Coordinape, and later joined Polygon and worked my way up to lead dev rel engineer.”

“And that is where I came to the realization, having lived in emerging markets for a considerable period of time, that the way people are using crypto in the western world is vastly different from the way people back home used it.”

“The potential of what this technology actually represented was very far removed. Especially when it came to the cycles in the midst of like the heights of like DeFi summer in 2020, and then the NFT craze picked up — you look at actual real use cases within that and they were very few and far between.”

“That’s when I saw the opportunity more clearly — emerging markets were using crypto as a lifeline, not just speculation. But the tools were being built for the speculators, there was a large gap in tools and financial systems being developed for those that needed them in emerging markets.”

“The financial rails just aren’t built for emerging markets.”

“In the West, you can link your bank to a wallet and move money seamlessly. But in places like Kenya, you’re stuck dealing with P2P traders and OTC desks just to get money on-chain.”

“This fragmentation slows businesses down. For example, I spoke to a manufacturer in Kenya running at 30% capacity — not because they lacked capital or labor, but because they couldn’t get USD to import raw materials.”

“Even big companies can’t get their money out. In the traditional banking system, when you actually go and deposit US dollars, the reality is that US dollars are not yours anymore. It doesn't belong to you. When you actually come to lay a claim on it and say, ‘I want to wire it back to my country,’ the bank says ‘well, you can't really do that, and we could only give you a fraction of that over a spread out period of time.”

“The main thing we’re solving is for the OTC desks – they're actually constrained by two things, the best price and deep liquidity. For example, if a business gets a client and the client wants $3 million today, they could get a request for $3 million in one day – it'll take them that whole day to be able to actually aggregate all of that liquidity – and the person may actually get the funds two days after the initial request.”

“If you have a decentralized protocol that allows them to be able to move efficiently in and out of local fiat, then you enable them to process much larger volumes right away – when cash flow isn’t tied up in FX delays, businesses can operate at full capacity.”

“The FX market in Africa and Latin America alone is worth $540 billion a year. But most of that happens off-chain, and it’s messy and expensive.”

“In Nigeria, the daily FX volume is about $800 million. If we capture even 1% of that, we’re looking at $3 million a day — almost $900 million a year — in fees. And that’s just one market.”

“When you bring a stablecoin on-chain, you bring the entire economy on-chain”

“You can issue government bonds, build lending markets, and attract foreign investors — all on crypto rails.”

“In Kenya alone returns on government bonds are roughly between 12 to 18 percent. You might ask, well, who cares about these government bonds? Who's actually buying it? Well, the Harvard Endowment Fund is buying local government bonds, the Saudi Sovereign Wealth Fund, and many sovereign wealth funds.”

“All of these funds are able to commit, say, at least 5% of their portfolio to exotic bonds, and they're able to get returns on it in a way that offsets any kind of risk. The local stablecoin is a step to bring these financial services onchain — with FX rates priced in real-time — that could unlock all different kinds of potential.”

“There’s no such thing as an official USD rate in most emerging markets. The price you get depends on who you know and what banking relationships they have. It’s completely subjective.”

“But in most emerging markets you have the ‘bank rate’ and the ‘street rate’ – or the OTC rate - which can vary significantly. Let’s say you’re in Colombia, and the bank gives you 20 pesos per USD, but the OTC rate is 24 pesos. This is the problem we found with Ripple and Stellar – they give you the bank rate, ViFi trades at the real rate.”

“If everything goes right, in three years, we'd be the global decentral bank. That's the goal.”

“Having deep liquidity for FX markets across different jurisdictions, while also having achieved a lot of the governing values of Ethereum. Having credible decentralization in terms of our governance and ensuring that the protocol is genuinely community-owned and run, while still managing the actual execution from a day-to-day standpoint.”

“At that point, you're looking at over $10 billion in assets under management and $1 billion in daily trading volume. Actively across multiple jurisdictions.”

“Volume is the holy grail. That’s how we measure impact.”

“If we hit $1 billion in trades, that’s $10 million a day in fees. Even if TVL or AUM go down, the scale keeps us profitable.”

“The world doesn’t need more memecoins. It needs tools that solve real problems.”

“Ideally, in a perfect world, we get rid of everything and we have one currency and we figure out how to price it in. But until that day, the reality of currency exchange is essentially asking, ‘how many apples do I need to get an orange?’ Right now, you don't know how many oranges you need to get apples in many emerging economies.”

“ViFi is the on-chain oracle that will be able to say, this is how many oranges are actually required. Because currently, nothing like that exists. And if we’re successful, businesses won’t have to shut down because they can’t get USD. Multinationals won’t have to beg banks for liquidity. We’re fixing the rails — and that opens up everything.”

Emerging markets have long been underserved by the global financial system, but ViFi is paving a path toward a more inclusive, accessible, and transparent future: the Open Economy. Tony and his team are not just solving today’s challenges–they’re building the infrastructure for tomorrow’s opportunities.

By streamlining cross-border capital movement and solving local currency fluctuation issues, this ambition and mission could rewrite the financial playbook for billions.

With products like ViFi, the Open Economy–a world that provides opportunities that might not have been available before–starts to feel less like a dream and more like an inevitability. For Tony Olendo, the journey to building this future is already underway.

I wish I had time to ask why he’s building on Scroll… but we ran out of time…

Follow Tony on Twitter or reach out on LinkedIn.