By Africa has steadily accelerated the switch to modern technologies. Cellphone-based payments have expanded particularly fast in countries like Kenya, Uganda and Zimbabwe, but it is South Africa. The continent’s most sophisticated economy that leads the pack where cryptocurrency regulation, adoption and development is concerned.
In 2018, according to Google Trends, South Africa attracted the highest number of online searches relating to BTC in the world. Despite downturns in the market at the time and thanks to bitcoin’s ongoing propulsion into the mass consciousness, investors now have a wider range of assets to choose from especially in a country that has capital controls restricting citizens from transacting across borders with more than roughly $72,000 worth of foreign assets or currencies.
The fact that cryptocurrency usage in South Africa tops various lists is not all that surprising as many experts have argued that inflation and poverty push people towards cryptocurrency ownership. The governmental Department of Statistics of South Africa released a report on 22 August 2017 revealing the population living in poverty had declined from 66.6% in 2006 (32.9 million) to 53.2% in 2011 (27.7 million) but then increased to 55.5% (30.6 million) in 2015. But the World Poverty real-time website on 8 August 2019 showed that 13.3 million people in South Africa live in extreme poverty, which means they survive on less than $1.25 a day.
South Africa is on the right path
For instance, SARB (South African Reserve Bank) made it clear that it intends to keep an eye on cryptocurrencies & potentially the future of securities/commodities but is currently not willing to curb trading and innovation fully. The body acknowledges that crypto-assets may perform similar functions to those of securities and commodities, and says South Africa does not intend to ban their trade. But monitoring the currently unregulated sector is very much on the cards.
It would seem things only got a lot better as the Global crypto exchange Bittrex led a $1.5 million seed round for South African trading platform VALR, in offering the most diverse range of assets of any African exchange. Bittrex CEO Bill Shihara told CoinDesk, the South African market has “tremendous untapped potential.” The economy is itself home to a number of bitcoin ATMs and digital currency exchanges including Luno, which has two million customers throughout the world, allowing people to buy and sell digital currencies in the local fiat currency, Rand.
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