Vivier and Jenya Zhivaleva co-founded The Surfer Kids, a registered South African non-profit, in 2010. In August 2021 he used that organisation as the platform for Bitcoin Ekasi, a project that pays its surf coaches, lifeguards, teachers and community workers entirely in bitcoin and onboards township shops so those wages can be spent locally without converting to rand.
His own account of how he arrived there is specific about dates. He says he has followed Bitcoin since late 2013, drawn in by the banking crisis and bank bailouts in Cyprus, and that a 2019 interview with Michael Peterson of Bitcoin Beach planted the idea of building a circular economy of his own. The first township spaza shops were onboarded in August 2021 and the coaches began receiving part of their salaries in bitcoin at the same time, spending it at those shops. The stated purpose is to extend an existing youth programme into financial empowerment rather than to promote Bitcoin for its own sake.