Yellow Card, a pan-African stable coin infrastructure organization that raised $33 million in October, has secured a Crypto Asset Service Provider (CASP) license in South Africa, a full-size step in its local expansion. This comes as South Africa moves to loosen its regulatory stance on cryptocurrency in 2024, with over 138 businesses now certified to perform in the country`s regulated crypto ecosystem.
“The CASP license … reflects our dedication to providing secure, compliant, and transformative solutions for our customers both in South Africa and across Africa,” Chris Maurice, Yellow Card`s co-founder and CEO, stated in a statement.
Yellow Card, which entered South Africa in 2020, operates in 20 African countries, permitting customers to apply stablecoins to ship cash throughout those countries. The startup claims to have facilitated over $three billion in transactions since its inception in 2016.
South African regulators started out licensing vendors of advisory offerings, exchanges, price gateways, and wallets to deliver oversight to the country`s developing crypto enterprise because the enterprise processed $26 billion in transactions between June 2023 and June 2024.
This regulatory framework has enabled the South African authorities to tax crypto returns and decrease dangers associated with cash laundering and terrorist financing.
However, the FSCA`s authority is constrained to licensing and overseeing Crypto Asset Service Providers (CASPs) for monetary offerings regarding crypto belongings and does now no longer equate to recognizing crypto belongings as prison soft or as “cryptocurrency.” The South African Reserve Bank additionally does now no longer presently understand crypto belongings as currency.
The earliest step in liberalizing South Africa`s crypto regulatory panorama was in November 2018 whilst the South African Reserve Bank (SARB), in collaboration with the Financial Sector Conduct Authority (FSCA), South African Revenue Services (SARS), and the Financial Intelligence Centre (FIC), installed the Crypto Assets Regulatory Working Group.
In October 2022, the FSCA declared crypto belongings as monetary products, bringing them under its regulatory jurisdiction. This flow paved the manner for the FSCA to open packages for licenses in June 2023 and started out the welcoming of crypto in South Africa
