National treasury and the Reserve Bank will rewrite their draft rules on moving crypto assets across South Africa’s borders after receiving “thousands of comments” on the proposals, finance minister Enoch Godongwana said on Wednesday.
“It is clear that we need to take a different approach to these amendments,” Godongwana told parliament in his medium-term budget policy statement. “We must aim to shift away from pre-approvals. Instead, we must assess transactions for legitimacy and tax compliance.”
He said the treatment of crypto assets should also be guided by recommendations from the Financial Stability Board, the international body that coordinates financial regulation for the G20 group of major economies. Consultations will begin, with the aim of publishing a revised second draft for further comment. Godongwana gave no timeline and did not say which provisions would change.
The rethink follows months of resistance from the crypto industry.
Godongwana first flagged the plan in his February budget, when treasury said it would bring crypto assets into the “capital flows management framework”, TechCentral reported at the time. The Reserve Bank had warned that because “crypto payments are borderless, they present an avenue to circumvent exchange controls”, and said nearly R63-billion had moved from South African bitcoin wallets to foreign wallets since January 2019.
Draft Capital Flow Management Regulations followed on 17 April. They would replace the Exchange Control Regulations of 1961 and, for the first time, formally bring crypto assets into the system. The draft would require every buyer of a crypto asset to make a written declaration of when and how it was acquired and where it is held.
It would also give officials broad powers to search for and seize currency, crypto assets, gold or securities, and contraventions would carry fines of up to R1-million and up to five years in prison. VALR CEO Farzam Ehsani called it “an alarming document”, pointing to the search-and-seizure powers.
Draft asset manual
The details came on 3 August, in a draft crypto asset manual for cross-border activities, released by the Reserve Bank’s financial surveillance department.
Individuals could move crypto offshore through authorised local providers, using their R2-million single discretionary allowance or the R10-million foreign capital allowance, which would require approval and tax compliance verified through Sars.
Companies would not be allowed to move crypto across the border in either direction: sending crypto from a local provider to an offshore one or to a private wallet, or receiving crypto from an offshore provider, would be a “non-permissible transaction”, TechCentral reported.
That put up a potential regulatory wall for rand stablecoins such as Zaru, launched in February with backing from Sanlam, Luno, EasyEquities and Lesaka Technologies and aimed at corporate treasuries. The manual would stop resident entities from entering crypto transactions “deemed as import or export of capital”.
In September, the Reserve Bank said the proposals were not settled. “These are draft requirements, and national treasury and the Reserve Bank, in collaboration with other regulators, are still engaging on various aspects of crypto assets, including the approach to stablecoins,” it said.
Luno, in its submission on the manual, argued that treating all stablecoin payments as capital flows, when the same payment made through a bank would not be, may clash with South Africa’s commitments to the International Monetary Fund. It also objected to the ban on companies moving crypto offshore. Comments on the manual closed on 30 September. – © 2026 NewsCentral Media
