South Africans are buying a lot of cryptocurrency
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Loading... - Polina Peterson
- 05 May 2022
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While Bitcoin’s slump and bearish price action have caused a drop-off in South Africans buying cryptocurrency, the surge in users and trading volumes during the past year was astronomical.
“We’ve seen a slight slow down in growth in Q1 2022, but this is after we grew over 450% in Q4 2021 — so it’s probably to be expected across the crypto industry,” Revix founder and CEO Sean Sanders told MyBroadband.
Revix is a cryptocurrency investment service that lets customers buy bundles of assets in addition to individual digital coins.
“The first few months of the year are also usually the slowest when dealing with retail investors as people have less discretionary income after the holiday season.”
Sanders said that Revix saw roughly 50% growth between the first quarters of 2021 and 2022, and 500% growth when comparing 2020’s numbers.
“Monthly volumes grew from around $2 million (R31.7m) in 2020 to over $70 million (R1.1 billion) in 2021.”
Cryptocurrency exchange VALR also reported significant growth.
VALR co-founder and CEO Farzam Ehsani told MyBroadband that they grew from 85,000 customers at the beginning of last year to over 275,000 this year.
“VALR processed just over R3bn in 2019, R27bn in 2020, and R78 billion in 2021,” Ehsani said.
AltCoinTrader’s David Porter said that they see an influx of users whenever there are big movements in cryptocurrency prices — up or down.
Porter said that looking at figures from just the past few months doesn’t paint a complete picture as the cryptocurrency market has been trading sideways since December 2021.
However, he did reveal that AltCoinTrader was signing up around 20,000 new users per month at the end of 2021 and the beginning of 2022.
This is up from roughly 5,000 new monthly sign-ups in 2019.
Porter said that AltCoinTrader’s user base is compounding at 45% per year — effectively doubling every two years.
They currently have over a million users registered. Read More…
