Denis Opudo
Many South Africans have redirected their investment on Bitcoins and the rise in popularity among citizens is desirable. Since the inception of cryptocurrency, South Africa has been on the lead when it comes to online investment. When comparing sales between January to November 2016 and 2017, it was evident that new traders on eToro rose by 671%. The data from etoro further revealed that there was a noticeable overall growth of 574% over the same period. Mati Greenspan who is an eToro analysis said that the rise is contributed by the fact that people trust cryptocurrency since their prices are not affected by the political and economic state of any country.
We tried to find out what could have triggered the rise in popularity especially and it was noted that the local currency debt was affected when Pravin Gordhan was fired in March 2017 and when S&P Global affected the local currency in November 2017.
People are advised to carefully invest since when the price drops, the most affected individuals in South Africa are those who invested little. The recent drop in the value of bitcoin from $19,343 to $14,869 resulted in many counting losses between Mid December 2017 and January 2018.
Luno’s head of marketing cryptocurrency exchange Mr. Werner van Rooyen also recognized the increase in cryptocurrency exchange. However, we failed to establish the actual number of South Africans involved in cryptocurrency trade. He said that in the previous year, approximately 1,000 bitcoins were exchanged weekly at a rate of R11.086. By 5th January 2018, it was recorded that 965 bitcoins were exchanged daily at a rate of R212,000.
South African Revenue Service said that they are consulting tech startups within the country to help in tracking cryptocurrency trade effectively. He confidently said that they will be able to adopt the technology that some countries such as UK and Canada are using to track blockchain technology.
