South Africa Wants Active Crypto Firms to get Licensed by Year-End

• The financial regulator of South Africa wants crypto firms to get licensed by the end of the year.
• The Financial Sector Conduct Authority said that it received 20 applications a few weeks ago.
• The FSCA believes it will receive a multitude of applications prior to the deadline on November 30.
• Crypto firms will be “closed down or fined” if they fail to comply with the new rules.

Crypto firms around the globe are trying to get licensed with regulators in different regions and not be pushed out of relevance, especially since the industry is still in its initial phase. Nevertheless, as per reports, the authorities in South Africa, the southernmost country in Africa, demanded that crypto firms get licensed in the country before the year ends.

As per the report from Bloomberg, the agency responsible for regulating the financial markets in the country, the Financial Sector Conduct Authority of South Africa, claims to have received about 20 applications since opening for licenses a few weeks ago, and it believes that a multitude of applications will come prior to the deadline for registration on November 30

FSCA Commissioner Unathi Kamlana stated that his agency aims to take “enforcement action that could see the firms being closed down or fined, if they continue to operate without a license past the deadline” in South Africa

“There is potentially serious harm to financial customers when using crypto products, and therefore it makes sense for us to introduce the regulatory framework,” Kamlana said in Pretoria. “Time will tell the effectiveness of our measures, and we will continue to work together with the industry to refine and make changes where and if necessary.”

More importantly, the FSCA has been very active when it comes to crypto regulations and recently announced that it was working with an “inter governmental fintech working group,” which includes agencies like the National Treasury and the South African Reserve Bank.

“There’s better transparency if you are in the formal sector,” Kamlana said. Being controlled by “an entity as tightly regulated as a bank, provides comfort.”

The requirement for registration comes at a time when the authorities in South Africa are investigating the disappearance of brothers Ameer and Raees Cajee, who ran a platform called Africrypt. The brothers disappeared with 70,000 Bitcoin in 2021, and investors are currently demanding the authorities arrest the two

As reported earlier by Bitnation, crypto firms are expanding their operations in Africa, and recently, pan-African crypto exchange Yellow Card won a license from the Non-Bank Financial Institution Regulatory Authority (NBFIRA) of Botswana to operate in the country.