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# Treasury wanted every crypto buyer to declare their coins in writing, and now it is rewriting the rules
- URL: https://www.businessbagel.com/treasury-wanted-every-crypto-buyer-to-declare-their-coins-in-writing-and-now-it-is-rewriting-the-rules/
- Published: 2026-10-27T03:30:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-27T03:29:59.000Z
- Description: The first drafts would have made buyers declare their holdings and let coins leave a local platform but never return, and the finance minister says they are being redone, with no date set.
- Author: Christian Maidman
- Tags: Policy, Business Bagel News

South Africa's government has had a change of heart about crypto. On 21 October, in his mini-budget speech, Finance Minister Enoch Godongwana told Parliament that the draft rules Treasury and the Reserve Bank published this year would be redone. They had received thousands of comments, he said, and "it is clear that we need to take a different approach to these amendments".

That matters to a lot of people. More than six million South Africans hold crypto, and Luno, VALR and Ovex alone were looking after more than R25 billion of it by late 2025.

## Rules that went rather far

The draft Capital Flow Management Regulations came out on 17 April. They would replace the 1961 exchange control rules, which govern money moving across the border, and for the first time formally bring crypto inside them. Anyone buying crypto would have had to declare in writing when and how they got it and where it was kept. Officials would have had broad powers to search for and seize crypto, cash, gold or shares, and breaking the rules could have cost up to R1 million and up to five years in prison.

## Then August got stranger

On 3 August the Reserve Bank published a separate draft manual on how crypto could cross the border. Individuals could still send crypto offshore through an authorised local platform, using the R2 million and R10 million allowances they already have, with approval and a tax check through Sars. Companies would have been barred from moving crypto across the border in either direction.

The oddest rule was for people who keep crypto in their own digital wallet rather than on an exchange. You could have moved coins from a South African platform into that wallet, within limits and with reporting, but not back again. Leaving was allowed. Coming home was not.

## Why the Reserve Bank wanted it

The regulator's worry was that crypto makes it easier to get around exchange controls, letting money move overseas outside the usual banking channels. Because crypto payments are borderless, it warned, "they present an avenue to circumvent exchange controls", and it counted nearly R63 billion moved from South African bitcoin wallets to foreign ones since January 2019.

The industry pushed back for months. In its submission on the August manual, Luno argued that treating every stablecoin payment as money leaving the country, when the same payment through a bank would not be, could clash with South Africa's commitments to the International Monetary Fund. It also objected to the ban on companies.

Godongwana now wants to stop asking for approval before transactions and instead check whether they are legitimate and comply with tax law. A revised draft is coming, but he gave no date and did not say which provisions will change, so nobody yet knows whether the declaration, the company ban or the one-way wallet rule will survive.