When 20,000 athletes from across the globe arrive in Danang this May for Ironman 70.3, the event will not only bring international attention to the city but also serve as the setting for a real-world test of Vietnam’s emerging financial infrastructure.
A consortium of six companies has integrated a blockchain-based cross-border payment system into the event’s sponsorship structure. The system is being deployed within the Danang IFC sandbox, with actual funds moving through existing financial channels under full compliance and tax reporting requirements.
Danang’s International Financial Center already has the legal framework, the sandbox license, and regulatory backing in place. What remains is to demonstrate that the infrastructure can operate end to end in practice, allowing capital to enter from abroad, circulate within the local economy, and be recorded with a clear and verifiable compliance trail.
Why the Danang IFC needs this
Vietnam’s International Financial Center in Danang was established to position the city as a hub for financial innovation, with sports tourism as its anchor economy. According to KPMG Vietnam, the IFC follows a one center, two destinations model, with Ho Chi Minh City handling capital markets and banking while Danang focuses on fintech, digital assets, and green finance.
The legal foundation came quickly. Resolution No. 222/2025/QH15 came into force on September 1, 2025, establishing a sandbox mechanism that allows companies to test new financial products and business models in a controlled environment. Danang followed by approving its first sandbox trial for Basal Pay, a digital asset conversion project licensed by the State Bank to convert crypto to VND, making it the first of its kind in Vietnam.
Having a sandbox on paper and having one that works in practice are two different things, however. The question the IFC needs to answer, for regulators, for government, and for global partners, is whether its ambition can be backed by real infrastructure. This pilot is an attempt to answer that question with something concrete.
There is also a compliance dimension that makes this more pressing. Vietnam’s Law on the Digital Technology Industry and Resolution No. 05/2025/NQ-CP mark a significant shift, as digital assets are now legally recognized as property, crypto exchanges require licenses, and service providers must meet AML and counter-terrorist financing obligations aligned with international standards. This is partly driven by Vietnam’s need to exit the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) gray list, which it was placed on in 2023 due to gaps in its AML framework. Being on the gray list means higher due diligence requirements for foreign institutions dealing with Vietnam, resulting in more friction, higher costs, and slower transactions for all parties involved. Every documented, compliant flow through the IFC sandbox serves as evidence that the system works as intended.
According to PwC Vietnam’s December 2025 analysis, total crypto holdings by Vietnamese are estimated at approximately USD 18 billion, projected to grow to USD 48-109 billion depending on how open the regulatory framework becomes, with Vietnam ranking second in ASEAN for crypto penetration after Singapore. The market is significant, the regulatory window is open, and the infrastructure now needs to be proven in practice.
The three payment flows in the Danang IFC sandbox
The pilot runs three payment flows during Ironman Vietnam weekend, covering the two directions that matter most for the IFC: money coming into Vietnam from abroad, and money moving from a Vietnamese treasury out to local businesses.
Flow one: Cross-border sponsorship settlement
Each of the six consortium companies contributes its share of a joint sponsorship in digital currency, whether USDT, USDC, Ethereum-based assets, or Hedera-based assets depending on the company. These are converted to VND through the Basal Pay sandbox gateway and settled into the event organizer’s existing bank account and accounting system, so the Ironman team receives the funds exactly as they normally would. The entire process carries a full KYC and AML forensics trail available for regulator review.
This flow addresses the IFC’s most fundamental concern: whether net-new foreign capital can enter Vietnam through a digital asset pathway in a way that is traceable, compliant, and compatible with the existing banking system.
Flow two: Local vendor disbursement
Once the sponsorship funds are received, a portion is ring-fenced for a specific event held during race weekend, such as a panel or innovation forum. Those funds are then paid out to Vietnamese vendors covering venue, food and beverage, and media. Each payment automatically triggers a VAT-compliant invoice, generated by a tax module that is already built. The result is a closed loop where foreign digital currency enters Vietnam compliantly, circulates through the local economy, and leaves a proper tax record behind.
Flow three: Purpose-bound giving – charity and scholarships
The system is also designed to handle a third category of fund flow: donations and scholarships where the intent of the money is defined at the point of contribution and preserved throughout.
A sponsor anywhere in the world can contribute to a specific cause: funding a young athlete who cannot afford to compete in the next race, or supporting a charity such as Newborns Vietnam’s neonatal care programs. At the moment of contribution, the purpose of the funds is attached to the payment: scholarship funding is rising-fenced from operational budgets and charitable donations are directed to their intended organizations without being redirected elsewhere.
As with the other flows, each transaction is converted and processed through the Basal Pay sandbox gateway with full KYC and AML compliance, and a tax invoice is automatically generated. The purpose-bound nature of the funds is maintained end-to-end: visible, auditable, and aligned with the original intent from donor to recipient.
This flow addresses a practical challenge common to international giving: sponsors contributing from abroad currently face fragmented channels, unclear tax treatment, and limited visibility into where their money ultimately lands. A compliant, transparent system that preserves donor intent while generating proper tax documentation makes cross-border charitable giving meaningfully more accessible.
For Ironman Danang specifically, this could support athletes from Vietnam or the region who qualify for but cannot afford to advance to subsequent races, with international sponsors able to contribute in digital currency through a channel that is both tax-compliant and fully traceable. Charity recipients such as Newborns Vietnam receive funds directly, not routed through the event organizer.
Together, the three flows demonstrate that digital currency can enter and move within Vietnam’s economy in a way that is FATF-compliant, tax-documented, and requires no changes to the host event’s existing systems.
Seven companies, one end-to-end system
Seven companies are involved, each covering a specific part of the stack with no overlap by design.
Sunrise Events Vietnam (SEV) provides the operational environment in which the consortium’s systems are deployed. As the entity responsible for organizing the deployment infrastructure, SEV ensures that the technical components built by the consortium’s member companies can be assembled, tested, and operated within a coherent and stable environment throughout the event.
Hedera provides the Layer 1 blockchain infrastructure and USDC access. The protocol is built for enterprise and regulated financial use cases and has prior experience working with regulators in multiple financial centers. Hedera’s Governing Council includes companies like Google, IBM, and Boeing, and the network has been used in live institutional contexts, including tokenized UK money market funds used as collateral in FX trades between Lloyds Banking Group and Aberdeen.
Animoca Brands contributes the KYC and AML forensics layer. They have deployed this compliance infrastructure in live contexts before, including a charity relief fund in Hong Kong that needed to verify the source of crypto donations in real time.
Hashpack handles digital asset custody and settlement within the Hedera ecosystem. Its relevance here is primarily technical, as Hashpack supports USDC, the stablecoin used by global banks for institutional settlement, in addition to USDT, giving the consortium access to both the local Vietnamese market standard and the global institutional standard in a single wallet infrastructure.
Basal Pay is the licensed local entity, holding a sandbox license from Vietnam’s State Bank to convert digital currency to VND and operate payments within the Danang sandbox. That license is what makes the flow legally operational rather than only technically possible, and very few companies in Vietnam currently hold an equivalent permission.
Open Campus, an Animoca portfolio company, is part of the consortium and is separately exploring education finance and credential use cases relevant to the IFC’s longer-term agenda. In Vietnam, Open Campus has already partnered with Luvia, in an initiative supported by the Ministry of Education and Training, to give Vietnamese students blockchain-verified credentials, initially targeting around 200,000 students across partner schools.
Varmeta represents a new generation of Vietnamese technology firms defined by strong R&D capabilities and international execution standards. With a strategic focus on emerging technologies such as Blockchain and AI, Varmeta has successfully built and deployed regulated systems across developed markets including Bitkub (Thailand’s largest digital asset exchange) and KLDX (Malaysia’s first SEC-licensed IEO exchange). Driven by a commitment to bring global expertise back to Vietnam, Varmeta is committed to playing a pivotal role in positioning Vietnam as a leading blockchain hub in the region, beginning with its role as the consortium’s primary systems architect for the country’s very first blockchain sandbox pilot.
As the local engineering lead for the Danang sandbox pilot, Varmeta handles the essential integration between global components and the Vietnamese operational environment. By connecting the protocol layer, compliance tooling, and wallet infrastructure directly to the event’s existing systems, Varmeta ensures that frontier technology functions seamlessly within a local context. Beyond the technical build, we serve as the on-the-ground technical authority, ensuring the system’s stability and scalability throughout the event’s lifecycle.
Why Ironman Vietnam is the right test environment
Ironman Vietnam is a practical choice for this pilot for a straightforward reason: it brings international participants and sponsors with international money into Danang every year, within an established operational structure. It also creates a bounded context, covering a specific weekend, a specific set of vendors, and a specific sponsorship amount, that makes the pilot easy to document and straightforward to replicate.
The same architecture, covering compliant inflow, compliant outflow, and an audit trail for regulators, applies to any event or context where the right licensed entities, compliance infrastructure, and local engineering can be assembled together. Ironman Danang is simply where that assembly is happening first. As Duane Morris Vietnam’s legal analysis of Decree 323 notes, Danang’s IFC explicitly prioritizes digital infrastructure, digital assets, and payment connectivity for cross-border transactions, which is precisely what this pilot demonstrates in practice.
Sports events also tend to attract the right audience for this kind of demonstration. Ironman participants generally skew toward high-income, internationally mobile professionals, and the race weekend draws government officials, tourism partners, and corporate sponsors into the same space. Having live infrastructure running in the background while the relevant stakeholders are present makes for a more useful demonstration than a closed-door pilot would.
Additional use cases being explored beyond the pilot
The two payment flows are the core of what the consortium is committing to for Ironman Vietnam, though several adjacent use cases are being explored for future events or phases.
The race weekend includes a 5k charity run associated with Newborns Vietnam, an organization that has spent over a decade reducing neonatal mortality across Vietnamese hospitals, beginning with a pilot at Danang’s Women and Children’s Hospital that reduced infant mortality by over 50% in its first two years. The consortium is exploring whether a portion of the sponsorship flow can be routed as a charitable donation using the same compliant infrastructure, which would create a third documented use case for digital giving within the sandbox.
Open Campus’s lending and credentialing infrastructure is also relevant to the IFC’s longer-term agenda, particularly for university students and early-career professionals in Danang who need access to education finance.
These are directions being explored rather than commitments for this event, and they become more feasible once the core infrastructure has been demonstrated to work reliably.
Conclusion
Danang has the sandbox license, the legal framework, and the regulatory intent. What it still needs is a documented case showing that the infrastructure works end-to-end, with money coming in, money being distributed, and a government-readable record at every step. This pilot is designed to be that case.
The architecture is also built to be replicable. The same compliant inflow, compliant outflow, and audit trail can be applied to other events, other cities, and other contexts wherever the right licensed entities and local engineering are available. Ironman Danang is where it runs first, and the goal is for it to become a reference that others can study and build on.