A Rand-backed stablecoin moving between South Africans never leaves the country. The rules should say so.
Reserve Bank Deputy Governor Fundi Tshazibana confirmed this month what everyone in this industry has been waiting to hear: new regulatory frameworks for crypto assets are coming. Her reasoning was blunt. Around eight million crypto trading accounts are now registered in South Africa, roughly double the number from early 2022. And since 2019, close to R63 billion has moved offshore through just the ten largest locally hosted Bitcoin wallets, outside the reporting perimeter the SARB relies on to track money moving across our borders. The Bank notes that the true figure is higher once other wallets and assets are counted.
That is not a crypto problem. It is a visibility problem. And Supercoin’s entire business model is built on solving it.
Regulation is not our obstacle. It is our product.
Supercoin issues ZARsc, a rand-backed stablecoin. Every unit is backed one-for-one by rand held at a South African bank and can be converted back into rand on licensed South African exchanges, with monthly agreed-upon procedures over our reserves, performed by Moore and published on our website. We are an FSCA-licensed crypto asset service provider (FSP 53458), registered with the Financial Intelligence Centre and backed by Super Group, a New York Stock Exchange-listed company.
So, when National Treasury published its draft Capital Flow Management Regulations in April, we engaged on two fronts. We put our name to the industry’s joint submission on making the framework workable, and we filed our own detailed comment. Because the sceptics miss something basic: a blockchain does not hide transactions. It records every one permanently. The R63 billion moved outside the reporting perimeter through channels built before the rules existed. A regulated, onshore stablecoin is the opposite of that problem. It is the version of this technology that a central bank can actually watch. Our entire model depends on the regulated route winning. When the SARB says it wants to see what is happening in the ecosystem, our answer is simple: so do we. That is why we built on rails a regulator can watch.
One asset, one ask
Our own submission asks Treasury for one thing above all. The draft currently treats every crypto asset identically, from Bitcoin to a fully backed digital rand. But when one South African sends a rand-backed stablecoin to another South African, nothing has left the country. The rand backing it never moves from a South African bank account. It is a local rand payment that settles in seconds, at any hour, with no clearing cut-offs. The draft treats that transfer with the same suspicion as sending Bitcoin to an offshore wallet, and that is the one thing we have asked Treasury to change: recognise a domestic, rand-backed, rand-redeemable stablecoin as its own category, and treat a transfer of it between two residents as what it is - a local payment rather than a cross-border capital movement.
The industry’s joint submission makes the same point from the other direction: treating rand-backed stablecoins as foreign currency by default would foreclose the very payment innovations the SARB itself has identified as central to South Africa’s payments future.
Encouragingly, the Deputy Governor herself drew exactly this distinction, pointing out that a rand-denominated stablecoin and a foreign-backed one have very different implications. That is the distinction we want written into the final rules.
What is actually at stake: the cost of moving money
This debate can sound abstract, so let me make it concrete. Sending $200 into Sub-Saharan Africa costs 8.78% on average, making it the most expensive region in the world to send money to, according to the World Bank’s most recently published figures. Chainalysis data shows that the region received $205 billion in on-chain value in the year to June 2025, up 52%, with stablecoins making up 43% of all crypto volume here. People are not using these tools to speculate. They are using them to pay, save and trade because the existing rails are slow and expensive.
Get the rules right and South Africa becomes the reference point for how an emerging market brings this inside the regulatory perimeter: instant settlement for businesses, payments that clear at 2 a.m. on a Sunday and a dramatically cheaper way to reach people the traditional system has struggled to serve. A fully backed digital rand, held in a KYC-verified wallet on a phone, is one of the most practical financial inclusion tools this country has seen. Get the rules wrong and the activity does not stop. It simply moves to channels nobody supervises, which is precisely how R63 billion moved beyond the reporting net in the first place.
Where we are going: a stablecoin for every major African currency
The rand is where we start, not where we stop. Much of the value Africa moves across its own borders is still routed through the US dollar, on flows that never needed to leave the continent. Our long-term ambition is a family of regulated, local-currency stablecoins for Africa’s major markets, each licensed locally and backed locally, so that African value can settle on African terms. South Africa, with the continent’s most developed regulatory framework for crypto assets, is the natural place to prove the model. Regulators’ own stocktake has identified several rand-backed stablecoins already in issue here. Whoever gets the framework right first sets the template for the continent.
The SARB says a lot of work will be done in the coming months to build these frameworks. We have offered to be part of that work, and our full submission to Treasury sets out practical fixes: a workable transition for already-licensed providers, thresholds published for comment and reporting obligations matched to actual risk. None of it asks for a free pass. All of it asks for rules that make the supervised route the obvious one.
Money should move at the speed of life. On the evidence of the past week, the regulator is asking the right questions. Now the rules need to catch up with both of us.
Gideon Greaves is Managing Director of Supercoin (Super Money SA (Pty) Ltd), an FSCA-licensed crypto asset service provider and part of NYSE-listed Super Group. Monthly agreed-upon procedures reports on ZARsc reserves, performed by Moore, are published at supercoin.co.za.
