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New Year, New Name

January 7, 2026
New Year, New Name

Growing Pains

In late summer 2025, BlockFX was little more than an idea shared among friends. Over the next four months, it grew from a weekend side project into a real product, with a growing team and a viable business model. As the project evolved, it became clear that the original name no longer fit. BlockFX matched the early vision, but it no longer reflected what we were building or where we wanted to go.

So we changed it. With the new year comes a new name, one that better reflects our vision: Ollo Finance.

Why Ollo?

Our new name was inspired by olo, the name researchers at UC Berkeley gave to a newly discovered blue-green color. It first shaped the visual identity of the project, but over time, the deeper connection became conceptual. What made olo remarkable was not just the color itself, but that it took a new technique called Oz for anyone to see it at all. That resonated with us. Opportunity often remains hidden until someone finds a new way to look. We see that same dynamic in what we are building.

Perspective

Foreign exchange is often seen as a market too large, too entrenched, and too slow for a startup to meaningfully improve. We see it differently. We know innovation can uncover opportunities others overlook. That belief is at the heart of Ollo. The name reflects our conviction that progress starts with a new perspective. For Ollo, that perspective makes the opportunities in FX plain to see.

References

[1] Kara Manke, "Scientists Trick the Eye into Seeing New Color 'Olo'," Berkeley News, April 22, 2025. Berkeley reports that researchers used the Oz system to produce perception of an intensely saturated blue-green color called "olo."
[2] Mark Fairchild, "Colorimetry," in Color Appearance Models (John Wiley & Sons, 2013), 56–84. Fairchild explains that human color vision operates within a bounded natural gamut, providing context for claims that Oz can produce color experiences beyond ordinary perception.
[3] James Fong et al., "Novel Color via Stimulation of Individual Photoreceptors at Population Scale," Science Advances 11 (2025): eadu1052. The paper describes Oz as a method for directly stimulating individual photoreceptors to expand perceived color space.