Key Takeaways:

• The convergence of traditional banking and Web3 is accelerating the rise of AI-driven Neobanks, ushering in a new era of intelligent financial management.
• VPay uses its proactive AI assistant, AVA, to unify the management of fiat currency, cryptocurrencies, and synthetic assets, reshaping the overall user experience.
• The project adopts a non-custodial architecture and integrates with multiple banks worldwide, enabling users to easily spend their preferred tokens in everyday real-world scenarios.
• VPay’s founder Amir emphasizes a “no-VC, community-driven” philosophy, with the $VPAY token positioned as the core of future profit-sharing and user rights within the ecosystem.

As traditional banking continues to merge with Web3 technologies, the crypto market is undergoing a major financial transformation. The idea of a “Neobank” is no longer just a concept — it’s rapidly becoming a widely adopted reality. This shift goes far beyond simple digital access; we’re entering an era of AI financial experiences, where money management becomes smarter, faster, and more personalized.

At the center of this evolution is VPay — a project positioning itself as the first AI-powered Omni Bank. Through its AI assistant AVA, VPay seamlessly connects and manages fiat, crypto, and even synthetic assets in one interface. It’s an ambitious vision: not merely simplifying spending and saving, but redefining how people understand and interact with finance itself.

During the AMA hosted by XT.COM on October 29, 2025, VPay founder Amir shared the inspiration behind this vision, the core value of the AI agent AVA, VPay’s global compliance and cross-chain financial infrastructure, the design of the $VPAY token, and how Neobanks may evolve through 2026 and beyond.

Start trading VPAY/USDT today on XT.COM and be part of the next chapter in AI-powered finance.

— Peter Lee (@pllgpt), Host at XT.COM

— Amir (@DeCryptoDudee), Founder of VPay

What inspired you to build VPay, and what gap did you see in the current neobank and crypto landscape that motivated this vision?

I’ve been in the crypto space since 2016. My background is in Web2 marketing — that’s where I started my career — and 2016 was also the year I bought my first Bitcoin, which pulled me into the industry. From there, I moved fully into Web3 marketing. I served as CMO for several NFT marketplaces during the NFT boom.

Last year, I founded my first project, Whale Intel on Virtuals. It’s already live and reached an all-time-high market cap of around $20 million, and it remains quite active in the Base ecosystem. After that, I started VPay together with a few friends. In addition to VPay and Whale Intel, I’m also one of the co-founders and a board member of German Blockchain Week.

Honestly, the project came from a very personal issue. One day I randomly realized I needed to check like five or ten different apps every single day just to manage my finances. I invest in stocks, so if I wanted to check those, I had to open one app. I live in the EU, so if I wanted to use my card or spend euros, I had to open Revolut, N26, and a bunch of different banking apps. If I wanted to check my crypto, I had to open several wallets, exchanges, and all of that. If I wanted to check my NFTs, I had to check two different apps. Basically, anything I wanted to do with my money, whether it was Web2 or Web3, required dealing with a crazy number of apps.

That’s really how VPay started. We all saw the same thing: Web2 and Web3 finance are extremely fragmented. I have two very good friends, so I reached out to them. One of my friends is very technical — he knows coding, programming, and AI. And another friend, coincidentally, is a banking expert with a lot of connections in the banking sector. It was like the perfect mix. So we thought: why shouldn’t we build this?

This is how VPay started, why it started, and where it’s going. The goal is to become your all-in-one finance app. Anything you need to do with your money, you’ll be able to do through VPay.

You’ve described VPay as “AI-powered banking that acts.” Could you walk us through how your AI assistant, AVA, actually helps users beyond traditional analytics?

To kick things off, I want to make it very clear that AVA is not a chatbot. Sure, it will have chat-like functionality too, but it’s so much more than that. We designed it from day one to be a proactive AI agent.

Most AI agents today require you to go to them and ask them to perform an action. But AVA was built from the start to act before you even need to reach out to it. That’s the first point I want to make clear.

The second part is AVA’s value proposition. What we’re trying to do is manage your money across both Web2 and Web3. So we have access to your spending habits — how you’re spending your money, where you’re spending it, where you’re overspending. We also see the Web3 side: your wallets, your non-custodial wallets, your trades — how you’re making money, how you’re losing money. AVA has visibility into all of this, which means it has an incredible amount of data and insight into your entire financial life — how your NFTs are doing, how your stocks are doing, what opportunities you’re missing, and what you could capitalize on.

Because we have access to all of this information, AVA can be a super customized, super personalized AI agent — again, a proactive AI agent — for each user. So that’s AVA’s value proposition. It’s far more than a chatbot — it has access to financial data no other product on the market has, and it is designed to be proactive, not reactive.

About user experience, how does VPay connect fiat and crypto so seamlessly, from offshore accounts to card issuance, while still keeping compliance in check?

So one of the benefits we had when starting VPay is that one of my co-founders is very deeply rooted in Web2 banking. We basically had the luxury of his expertise — something that normally costs a lot of money, years, time, and resources.

We work with three different banks in three different jurisdictions. That means we’re one of the very few crypto card providers — even though crypto cards are not our main focus — that offer virtual and physical cards, offshore accounts, and more. Our cards and accounts work globally anywhere Visa works.

And when one bank fails in a certain region, the others automatically cover it. For example, if our Asian bank doesn’t work in a specific jurisdiction, we fall back on our EU-based bank. So that setup makes us globally available — which is one of our biggest advantages — and it also explains how we connect fiat and crypto so seamlessly.

I think that’s one of the most innovative parts of what we’ve built. There are many crypto card providers, but most of them only support one or two chains, and even then, they only support a handful of tokens. Most providers limit users to stablecoins or a few easier chains like Polygon, Optimism, or Avalanche.

What we’ve built is different. We can make literally any token spendable in real life within a matter of hours. It’s our own approach and innovation. Not only can you top up and spend USDC through VPay — if you have a favorite token, you can reach out to us or the project, and we can set up a collaboration to make that token spendable extremely quickly and at almost zero cost.

We keep your non-custodial wallet in the loop at all times — maximum security and maximum control. For every in-app transaction, you have the final say. Unlike other crypto banks where everything happens behind the scenes, everything on VPay is transparent and on-chain.

At the center of this ecosystem is the $VPAY token. Can you explain how staking $VPAY translates into real-world benefits?

I’m sure this is the question for a lot of $VPay holders and users and live listeners here. I’m gonna answer this question in two parts. And the second part is actually a big—well, you could call it alpha.

So the first part is the usual part. It’s nothing groundbreaking, the same way that a lot of other companies and crypto banks, neobanks work. $VPay is gonna be, again, the centerpiece of everything. You hold more $VPay, you get a higher tier.

It’s like in traditional banks—like Revolut, JP Morgan, Citi, whatever bank you use—where you pay $20 a month or $80 a month to get higher tiers. Better benefits, gold, silver, platinum, all these different levels. For $VPay, you hold or stake more $VPay, you get better tiers—again, better fees, better cashback, better rewards, better access, everything.

The second part is one of my personal beliefs, and not only for VPay but for all of my projects. VPay started with zero VC funding, same as my first project at Whale Intel. I’ve raised money from VCs before for my previous projects—over the years I’ve raised millions—but I’m gonna be very frank here. For those of you who’ve worked with VCs, I’m pretty sure you all agree, and a lot of you are retail users, and I think we all agree that we hate VCs. We really do. I hate working with VCs, I hate a lot of things that VCs stand for, how they deal with and look at projects. I’m just not a big fan. So VPay was self-funded and founder-funded since day one.

And why I bring that up is because I believe in true co-ownership of projects. So down the line, we started with users—we really value our users, our ecosystem, our community—and down the line, I’m gonna be giving back to them. I want to be giving back to these users and this community instead of making some VC rich.

And once VPay gets to the level of, I don’t know, Revolut—which in my opinion is inevitable, because it’s the next evolution of banks, what we call neobanks—once it reaches, like, a $75 billion valuation with millions or billions in revenue every year, we’re gonna be distributing the profits between the holders and the stakers.

Because we don’t have stocks, we don’t have VCs. And of course we’ll use a portion of the money to fund the project and use for marketing and all of that. But again, since day one, VPay was funded by the community. So we’re gonna be using the $VPay token as the metric to give back to the community.

This is my vision for VPay and all of my projects, because it’s something I truly believe in. And it’s something aligned with the idea that we should be phasing out VCs. This is what I can do to give back to that movement of phasing out VCs.

Looking ahead, what can users expect from VPay in the coming months? How will these next milestones push the boundaries of what a neobank can do?

So right now we have our virtual cards, we have the swaps, the bridges, users can top up their cards using any token—I mean, the tokens that we’ve made live. But technically, theoretically, we can make any token spendable in real life.

And that’s one of the things we’re gonna keep adding: these tokens to VPay. And it’s not just tokens. What we do is, any token that we add is also a collaboration and marketing collaboration with the community and the holders of that token, which will also be pouring into VPay. So it’s like a flywheel that keeps going and going. The sky is the limit when it comes to that. We’re probably gonna be the platform with the highest number of tokens spendable in real life in no time. Because again, we do it super cheap and super quickly.

Other than that, offshore accounts are dropping soon. But again, these are not our focus at all. Let me emphasize that—even though I believe we have the best offshore accounts in the crypto market, again because of my co-founder’s banking connections. Super private, limitless, basically any perk you can think of. You can transfer money, withdraw from ATMs — any perk you can think of, you have it with our offshore accounts.

These are just step one out of probably a hundred for us. That’s one piece of the puzzle. And we’re just gonna keep building the puzzle regarding users’ finances across Web2 and Web3. We’re gonna keep adding more and more pieces.

In the next phase, we will continue rolling out more features, such as:

• Multi-wallets, and all these apps that users can use to work with their money
• Hedge fund manager, and users can get APY by just staking or by putting money in the vault
• Staking and yields
• Market intelligence
• Automated trading
• Synthetic stocks

I just want to paint the picture: when users think of their money—anything money-related—crypto, fiat, NFTs, stocks, hedge funds, savings, credit cards, checking accounts, whatever you do with your money in your country, in your bubble, on a daily basis… and I’m pretty sure you’re using at least 4–5 apps for it. All of that is gonna be on VPay.

And some of you might say, “Oh, this is a very ambitious idea, it’s impossible to do.” And for that, I have one answer: we have the blessing of launching within the Virtuals ecosystem. So for a lot of these services, we do not have to reinvent the wheel. For example, if we want to do market intelligence, we don’t have to build the whole thing ourselves—we just partner up with the best available, the best of the best, and have them build with us.

And we already have more than ten of these partners committed to building within the VPay app. And all of this is gonna be done within our ecosystem.

So even though we do not have the backing of a huge VC behind us—worth hundreds of millions of dollars—we can do all of this way more quickly than all these big-player neobanks.

About XT.COM

Founded in 2018, XT.COM is a leading global digital asset trading platform, now serving over 12 million registered users across more than 200 countries and regions, with an ecosystem traffic exceeding 40 million. XT.COM crypto exchange supports 1,300+ high-quality tokens and 1,300+ trading pairs, offering a wide range of trading options including spot trading, margin trading, and futures trading , along with a secure and reliable RWA (Real World Assets) marketplace. Guided by the vision “Xplore Crypto, Trade with Trust,” our platform strives to provide a secure, trusted, and intuitive trading experience.