Cape Town, Crypto City Guide

City: Cape Town Country: South Africa Population: 4.77 million Established: 1652 Languages: Afrikaans, Xhosa, English

Jump: Cape Town Crypto Culture, Crypto Projects and Cuba, Crypto Financial Infrastructure, Where Crypto is Going, Crypto Controversies, Blockchain Education, Famous Crypto People from Cape Town.

Located at the southernmost tip of Africa, the image of Cape Town is defined by the monumental Table Mountain. South Africa's second most populous city, the “Mother City” is consistently cited as a top vacation spot.

The city is in a place of undeniable geographical importance, as it is the place where the ships that go around the tip of Africa change direction from south to east or vice versa. It was here in 1652 that the Dutch East India Company established the Cape Colony to supply Dutch ships traveling to East Africa, India and the Far East, making it the first European settlement in modern-day South Africa.

Cape Town was captured by British forces in 1795, and returned to Holland in 1803, but was recaptured in 1806 as part of the Napoleonic Wars, with a later treaty giving the British permanent control.

Western Cape In 1910, it became a territory of the Union of South Africa, founded by Britain. The city was under apartheid from 1950 to 1990, with neighborhoods segregated by race and many political prisoners, including Nelson Mandela, on nearby Robben Island. Voting rights for all races were eventually restored, and a new constitution was ratified in the early 1990s.

Long seen as the gateway to southern Africa, Cape Town's airport is Africa's fifth. The surrounding valleys boast world-class wineries.

Cape Town's crypto culture

Cape Town can be considered a crypto hub in Africa, with several conferences organized every year. These include accepting Bitcoin in January and the Crypto Fest Cryptopia in November. The first ETH CapeTown, a hack-a-thon, took place in 2019.

The oceanside city is often compared to Johannesburg – or “Joburg” – as the locals say – “a business center where people are interested in doing business and creating relationships of mutual benefit, which is the hallmark of Cape Town.”

ApeCoin has chosen the city for its first African event. with music festival Ultra on March 1, 2024. Nelson Mandela's grandson Kweku Mandela was the guest of honor and Steve Aoki and Skrillex performed. ApeCoin DAO Special Council member and ApeChain co-author Hervé Lahren explained that he spends several months of the year in the city, “because of its crypto-friendly digital nomad population,” adding. It is a favorite winter spot for industrial VCs.

Greg van der Spey, co-founder and CEO of Dark Fusion Technology, a smart contract company, said that crypto meetings in the city are “very informal in nature, often business events turn into social affairs.” The firm's penthouse office has a rooftop barbeque area for hosting meetings.

Acknowledging that “there are still untrustworthy actors,” he argues that the connections are created naturally here, comparing it to areas like California, where people want to open their networks only if they can benefit directly.

From the magazine interactions around town, it seems that many genuine friendships can be formed quickly, with people often looking for the real person behind the business or product.

Cape Town crypto projects and companies

Crypto companies are springing up all over the city, spanning a variety of use cases, from local energy sharing to globally competitive blockchain infrastructure companies.

When it comes to DeFi, Neonomad runs various applications on Solana and has developed ZarCoin, a stablecoin pegged to the South African rand, which is fully supported and complies with local regulations. ZARP is another relatively stable coin, which means South Africans have options to use Web3 without giving up too much leverage to the USD. For those looking to start a project, Block Markets Africa and Rainfin Token offer design, specification and legal structuring services to bring them into compliance.

Wildcards.world is an NFT trading platform dedicated to images of endangered animals, raising over $200,000 for conservation efforts. The solar exchange installs solar panels on what it calls the sunniest places on Earth, paying investors with the proceeds of electricity sales through the sale of cryptocurrency. FoodPrint uses blockchain traceability to provide supply chain management services, especially for small farmers.

Through his podcast, Crypto Banter is known around the world and has contributed a South African flair to the global crypto conversation.

The sector is becoming more prestigious. South Africa's Financial Sector Conduct Authority approved 59 operating licenses for crypto businesses this week, with another 262 license applications still pending.

Cape Town's crypto financial infrastructure

The city boasts three major crypto exchanges: OVEX, Luno, and Circle-supported VALR. According to van der Spey, South African exchanges offer significant arbitrage opportunities to similar exchanges elsewhere, with the difference in crypto rates being “0.5%–3.6% at any given point”. In an interview earlier in the day, he said bitcoin on South African exchanges was 2.5% more expensive than comparable exchanges abroad.

This is because of the “tighter regulatory controls” around international money transfers that have been put in place to “prevent capital flight out of the rand system”. However, he says that liquidity has improved as more competition has entered the market.

As a country with many immigrants from all over Africa, access to traditional banking services is not a given for everyone. Using examples from his own circle, van der Spuy explains how citizens who send money back home rely on gray market money transfer services, which charge fees of up to 30% – an already modest $100 monthly remittance. But cryptocurrencies, especially stablecoins, are starting to offer an alternative — even if finding outside trumps, such as an exchange on the currency's destination, is often a challenge.

“As a South African, it's very difficult to get a bank account,” Van der Spuy said.

Where can I withdraw crypto?

A number of businesses accept cryptocurrency locally, many of which have started doing so in the past year.

Pick-n-Pay is unique, with over 2,000 stores allowing you to pay for grocery shopping, airtime and even utility bills for BTC through partner CryptoQR.

Cape Coffee Beans offers coffee flavors across the continent.

Several e-commerce sites active across the country accept crypto – these include fashion store RunwaySale Takealot.com, as well as The Team Merchant and Custom Candies. Ikea importer Nevada Furniture made the list.

Crypto controversies in Cape Town

Like any city with a large crypto community, Cape Town has seen its share of scammers and hackers. According to a Chinalysis report in 2021, the city was the site of a major bitcoin scam when Mirror Trading International (MTI) promised depositors a 0.5% daily return, collecting $588 million from nearly half a million wallets before it was involved.

Many Cape Town clients are caught up in the 2021 Africrypt controversy. The Joburg exchange, run by brothers Ame and Rais Kaje, has sent out notices to users about missing money, asking them not to make any reports to the police. According to media reports, the brothers then lost $3.6 billion in cryptocurrency.

Unlike Dubai or Switzerland's Crypto Valley, crypto travelers are advised to pack their shiny watches and strong wallets, as the country's vast wealth disparity contributes to high crime rates. Electric fences and razor wire are a common sight around family homes. As such, extreme caution – especially when it comes to devices with crypto access – is essential.

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Blockchain education in Cape Town

A two-day Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency course is offered by Knowledge Academy several times a year, while Blockchain Academy offers in-person and online courses ranging from “Business for Beginners” to “Legal and Regulatory Implications.”

For those with more time to explore, the University of Cape Town offers a six-week course entitled “Blockchain and Digital Currency: The Future of Money”. In the year In 2019, the university partnered with Registry to easily verify and store student records into a blockchain database.

Paxful, one of the largest peer-to-peer bitcoin marketplaces in the world, and startup Grind South Africa side hustler and entrepreneur Whisper, have teamed up to present a free workshop at the University of Cape Town on the bitcoin economy.💎🔥 pic.twitter.com/xKUCoM3t1B

— Society of UCT Entrepreneurs (@SocietyUct) May 14, 2019

Famous crypto people from Cape Town

Fantom co-founder Andre Cronje; Monero Guardian Riccardo Spagni – aka Fluffypony; Markus Swanepoel, co-founder of Luno Exchange; Country Manager at Luno Exchange, Christo de Wit; Greg Van der Spey, CEO of Dark Energy Technologies; CEO of OVEX Exchange, Jonathan Ovadia; Hannes Wessels, General Manager of Southern and Francophone Africa at Binance; Founder of Fynbos Adrian Hope-Bailey; Gideon Graves, Managing Director of CVV ​​Africa

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Elias made us

Elias Ahonen is a Finnish-Canadian author based in Dubai, who bought his first bitcoin in 2013 and has since worked as a small blockchain consultancy around the world. His book, Blockland, tells the story of the industry. He holds a Master's degree in International and Comparative Law and wrote a thesis on NFT and Metaverse Regulation.

Follow the author @eahonen