SOUTH AFRICA WILL REDRAFT ITS CROSS-BORDER CRYPTO RULES — GODONGWANA: “SHIFT AWAY FROM PRE-APPROVALS” — HIS SPEECH NEVER SAYS WALLET, AND THE DRAFT COUNTED A MOVE TO YOUR OWN WALLET AS AN EXPORT OF CAPITAL

South Africa's finance minister, Enoch Godongwana, told Parliament on October 21, 2026 that the draft cross-border crypto rules will be rewritten. In his medium-term budget speech he said, "We received thousands of comments, and it is clear that we need to take a different approach to these amendments." He added: "We must aim to shift away from pre-approvals. Instead, we must assess transactions for legitimacy and tax compliance." A revised second draft will go out for comment. He gave no date.

What the speech left out matters more to anyone who holds their own keys. The Reserve Bank's draft crypto manual, published August 3, treats a move from a local exchange to your own wallet as a cross-border flow. Law firm Baker McKenzie reads it as saying such a transfer "would be classified as an export of capital" even though nothing leaves the country. Per Baker McKenzie and TechCentral, people would have to fit it inside yearly allowances of R2 million, or R10 million with tax approval, and companies could not do it at all. Bitcoin.com describes a wider ban on transfers to and from non-custodial wallets. The speech's three paragraphs on crypto never use the word wallet.

Assessing transactions for legitimacy is not the same as leaving them alone. It swaps a permission slip for a review after the fact. The April 17 draft regulations, as TechCentral reported them, also asked buyers to declare where an asset is held, with fines up to R1 million and up to five years in prison. Nothing in the speech withdraws those. TechCentral reports the Reserve Bank's figure of nearly R63 billion moved from South African bitcoin wallets to foreign wallets since January 2019.

A coin in your own wallet moves without asking anyone. That is the thing these drafts were written to fence in. The minister backed off the permission step. He did not say a word about the keys. Until the second draft says what happens to self-custody, the first draft's answer still stands on paper. At the time of this writing, bitcoin was $81,616.