For decades, telecom companies have built something financial apps would happily spend billions trying to recreate: a direct line to millions of customers. Iris wants to turn that advantage into a financial network, and its first live operator is Bolivia’s VIVA.
Iris is working with VIVA to move part of the carrier’s financial operations onchain, using Avalanche as the underlying infrastructure. The company says the model can support stablecoin settlement, dollar-denominated reserves and new financial services without forcing telecom operators to rebuild the systems already running their businesses.
VIVA, which has operated in Bolivia for more than 25 years and recently expanded into Mexico, is the first carrier to go live on Iris. Its rollout uses USDi, a dollar-backed stablecoin issued by Agora, for transaction settlement and eligible operating reserves.
The idea is less about turning a telecom company into a crypto app than quietly adding financial infrastructure underneath it.
Iris CEO Jules Miller, a former partner at IBM Blockchain Ventures who helped launch IBM’s blockchain venture group, described the company as “the financial network for telecom operators.” Carriers can connect identity, billing and distribution systems to the network while handling financial activity in U.S. dollars.
VIVA CEO Ryan Alvarez said the arrangement is designed to build on infrastructure the company already has rather than replace it. “Iris lets us earn new revenue on that investment and grow into a platform, without replacing the systems our business already runs on.”
The commercial logic behind Iris is tied to a problem that has been building inside telecom for years. Iris cites McKinsey figures showing that global mobile data traffic grew by more than 50% annually between 2012 and 2025, while operator service revenue rose by less than 1% per year.
Why Iris Is Betting on Telecom Networks
That gap helps explain the appeal of Iris. Mobile carriers already have customers, identity systems and physical distribution networks—three pieces that financial technology companies often have to work hard to acquire.
The advantage may be particularly visible in emerging markets. Ava Labs Chief Business Officer John Nahas told CoinDesk that, unlike in the U.S., where a carrier is “one rail among many,” mobile operators in places such as Bolivia can function as a much more central part of everyday digital life.
That is also shaping where Iris plans to expand. The company expects its early growth to center on Latin America, with potential opportunities in parts of Africa and Asia, rather than the U.S.
VIVA is already being used as an early proof point. Nahas said a super-app product developed with the carrier reduced churn among prepaid customers by 33% while increasing their lifetime value by 35%.
For Iris, the next question is whether those results can be repeated across more operators. The company says it is now in discussions with additional telecom carriers around the world.
Under the hood, Iris runs on its own Avalanche Layer 1, giving it control over settlement, operations and compliance requirements. USDi functions as the network’s settlement asset, while VIVA can also hold eligible operating reserves in dollars rather than local currency.
That matters in markets where local currencies can be volatile. Instead of making blockchain the product customers have to notice, Iris is betting that it can become infrastructure customers barely see.
The approach follows other corporate experiments involving Avalanche. South Korean trading company POSCO has brought trade receivables onto the network, while Hyundai has been moving a stablecoin-based internal remittance system between its U.S. and Mexico operations toward production readiness.
For Iris, the larger idea is simple: a telecom account could eventually double as a wallet, dollar transfers could move as stablecoins, and financial services could operate behind the scenes.
That helps explain Miller’s focus on businesses that already have a practical reason to use blockchain. Rather than starting with a token and looking for a purpose, Iris is starting with an established business—and trying to make more of the infrastructure around it financially useful.