Crypto asset risk disclosure.

Version 1.0 · Effective 18 August 2026 · Last reviewed 18 August 2026 · Next scheduled review 18 August 2027

1. The warning required by the ARB Code

Investing in crypto assets may result in the loss of capital as the value is variable and can go up as well as down.

That sentence is quoted verbatim from Section III, clause 17 of the Code of Advertising Practice of the Advertising Regulatory Board, which has applied to crypto asset advertising in South Africa since 23 January 2023. It is not softened anywhere on this website, and it appears at the foot of every page for the same reason.

Clause 17 exists because a great deal of crypto advertising in this country did the opposite. Read the rest of this page as the detail behind that one sentence.

2. What this document is, and what it is not

This is a general risk disclosure. It describes risks that attach to crypto assets and to the exchange of crypto assets for rand. It does not assess your circumstances, your other holdings, your income, your obligations or your tolerance for loss, and it is therefore not advice about whether any transaction is suitable for you. Section 17 of this document says so again at the end, because it is the point the whole page turns on.

The desk is required by section 14 of the FAIS General Code of Conduct to communicate in a way that is factually correct and balanced between risk and benefit. This page is the risk half of that balance, and it is deliberately longer than the benefit half.

3. Price volatility

The rand price of a crypto asset can move by double-digit percentages in a day, and has done so repeatedly. It can move while you are reading a quote, while a transfer is confirming on a network, and while a bank is reviewing an incoming payment. There is no circuit breaker, no closing bell and no authority that steps in to stabilise a price.

This has three practical consequences for a trade with this desk. First, an indicative price on this site is a snapshot and nothing more. Second, a firm quote has a short validity period precisely because the desk cannot hold a price against a market that moves this fast. Third, if a quote lapses and is re-issued, the new price may be materially worse than the one that lapsed, and neither party is at fault when that happens.

Volatility is symmetrical. It is the reason a crypto asset can be worth more when it arrives than when it left, and the reason it can be worth much less.

4. A crypto asset is not legal tender, and sits outside the National Payment System Act

The South African Reserve Bank has been consistent that a crypto asset is not legal tender in South Africa. No person is obliged to accept one in settlement of a debt, and no authority guarantees its value or its convertibility.

Joint Communication 1 of 2026, issued on 28 May 2026, confirms that crypto is neither money nor funds for the purposes of the National Payment System Act, and that facilitating a customer paying a merchant in crypto assets — property expressly included — is an intermediary service under the FAIS Act rather than a payment service. The practical effect is that the protections built into the national payment system, including the recourse mechanisms attached to card schemes and interbank payments, do not attach to a blockchain transfer.

Crypto assets are a declared financial product under the FAIS Act by General Notice 1350 in Government Gazette 47334 of 19 October 2022. That declaration regulates the people who deal in them. It does not make the asset safe, and it was never intended to.

5. There is no deposit insurance and no compensation scheme

Money in a South African bank account is covered by the Corporation for Deposit Insurance, within its limits. A crypto asset is not a deposit and is covered by nothing comparable. There is no statutory compensation fund that reimburses you if a crypto asset loses value, if a platform fails, if a counterparty defaults or if a private key is lost.

The FAIS Ombud can determine a complaint against a licensed provider and can order it to pay, but that is recourse against a firm's conduct, not insurance against a market. If the price falls, no ombud, regulator or insurer will make you whole.

6. Blockchain transactions are irreversible

Once a transaction is broadcast to a blockchain and confirmed, no one can reverse it. Not the desk, not the network, not a miner or a validator, not a court order. There is no chargeback, no recall and no dispute process. This is a property of the technology, not a policy choice by anyone.

The practical implications are worth stating individually. A transfer sent to the wrong address is gone. A transfer sent in the wrong amount cannot be clawed back; it can only be returned voluntarily by whoever received it. A transfer made under the influence of a scam is not recoverable through the mechanisms that would apply to a card payment. And a transfer made in haste, because somebody created urgency, is as final as one made carefully.

7. Wrong network and wrong address

The same ticker exists on several networks and the addresses are not interchangeable. USDT exists on TRC-20, ERC-20, BEP-20 and Solana. USDC exists on ERC-20, Solana and Base. ETH exists on Ethereum, Arbitrum and Base. Sending an asset to an address on a network the recipient does not support usually means the asset cannot be retrieved, and where retrieval is technically possible it is slow, uncertain and expensive.

Address substitution is a live threat. Clipboard-hijacking malware replaces a copied address with an attacker's address, and the two look similar at the first and last few characters, which is exactly the part most people check. An address received in a message can be edited by anyone who has compromised the channel.

The desk's controls against this are simple and you should insist on all of them: the network is stated in every firm quote, a dealer reads the address back to you, and the first settlement to any new address is preceded by a small test transfer. If you decline the test transfer to save a few minutes or a few rand in fees, you have accepted the risk yourself.

8. Counterparty and issuer risk, including stablecoin depeg

A stablecoin is a liability of its issuer, not a bank deposit and not a rand. Its value depends on the assets the issuer holds, the quality of those assets, the issuer's willingness and ability to redeem, and the market's belief in all three. USDT and USDC have both traded away from one dollar during periods of stress, and other stablecoins have lost their peg permanently.

A depeg matters more than it looks. If you hold a dollar stablecoin as a way of holding dollars, a two percent depeg is a two percent loss on the whole position, arriving at the moment you are most likely to want to sell. Redemption at par is a promise by an issuer, not a guarantee by a state.

Beyond issuers, every venue and counterparty in the chain carries risk: an exchange the desk hedges on, a bank in the settlement path, a bridge between networks, and a smart contract holding a token's logic. The desk manages this by spreading exposure and by settling quickly rather than holding positions, and that reduces the risk without removing it.

9. Liquidity risk on size

The price you see quoted is the price for a small clip. A large order consumes the order book, and the average price achieved is worse than the top of the book. This is slippage, it grows with size, and it grows faster in a thin asset than in a deep one.

The rand pairs on South African venues are less deep than the dollar pairs offshore, and depth varies with the time of day and with what else is happening in the market. A trade that fills cleanly on a Tuesday morning may not fill cleanly on a Sunday night, or during an event that has everyone trading at once.

An OTC desk exists partly to manage this: pricing a large order once, in full, is usually better than pushing it into a public book in pieces. But it does not abolish the constraint. On a genuinely large ticket the desk may quote a wider spread, may work the order over a period, or may decline the size at that moment. It will tell you which, and why.

10. Operational and cyber risk

Systems fail. A blockchain can congest, fork or re-organise. A network's fees can spike so that a small transfer becomes uneconomic. An exchange API can go down mid-hedge. A bank's payment rail can be unavailable, and South African banks do schedule maintenance windows. A public holiday can delay a settlement that would have taken minutes on a business day.

On your side, the largest single risk is the security of your own devices and accounts. A compromised email account lets an attacker read your correspondence with the desk and time an intervention. A compromised phone lets them intercept a one-time password. Malware on a computer can alter what you see in a browser.

The desk will never ask you for a private key, a seed phrase, a one-time password or remote access to a device, and it never changes its banking details by message. Any communication that does either of those things is not from the desk, whatever it looks like.

11. Regulatory change risk

South African crypto regulation has changed materially every year since 2022, and it is not finished. The declaration of crypto assets as a financial product came in October 2022. The transitional exemption for unlicensed operators closed on 30 November 2023. FIC Directive 9 of 2024 brought the FATF Travel Rule into force on 30 April 2025 with no minimum threshold. Joint Communication 1 of 2026 arrived on 28 May 2026.

The most significant open item is the draft Crypto Assets Manual for cross-border activities published by the South African Reserve Bank and National Treasury on 3 August 2026, open for public comment until 30 September 2026. It is a draft. It is not law, it may change before it is finalised, and nothing on this site should be read as telling you what the final position will be. What it does tell you is that the cross-border treatment of crypto assets is being actively rewritten, and that a transaction structure which is lawful today may need to be done differently in a year.

A change in law can affect you directly: new information may be required from existing clients, reporting obligations may broaden, and a type of transaction may become one the desk can no longer facilitate. The regulatory updates page keeps a dated record so that you can see what changed and when.

12. Banking risk, account review and de-risking

Every rand leg of every trade runs through the banking system, and banks apply their own risk appetite on top of the law. A payment connected to crypto can trigger a fraud review, a request for supporting documents, a delay of days, or in some cases the closure of an account. This happens to clients, and it happens to desks.

De-risking is a real phenomenon in South Africa. A bank may decide that an entire category of customer is more trouble than it is worth and exit the relationship, with notice and without a detailed explanation. The desk maintains banking relationships carefully and keeps its documentation in order precisely because of this, but it cannot promise that a bank will never delay or query a payment, and it has no power to overrule a bank's decision about your account or its own.

Practical mitigation: use an account in your own name that is already used to receiving payments of this size, keep the firm quote and confirmation so that you can evidence the source, and tell your bank in advance if a payment is unusually large for that account.

13. Exchange control risk

This is the risk most often underestimated, and the consequences are criminal rather than financial. The South African Reserve Bank's Financial Surveillance Department has stated that it will not approve a cross-border transfer for the purpose of purchasing crypto assets, that buying crypto assets in South Africa in order to externalise capital contravenes the Exchange Control Regulations and is a criminal offence, and that value cannot be repatriated into South Africa through crypto assets under the allowances.

The single discretionary allowance is R2 million per calendar year, raised from R1 million by Exchange Control Circular 6/2026 on 8 April 2026. The foreign capital allowance is R10 million and requires a SARS Tax Compliance Status PIN. Those allowances govern how a resident may transfer funds abroad through authorised dealers. They are not a licence to move value across a border using a blockchain, and treating crypto as a way around them is precisely the conduct FinSurv has warned about.

This desk does not move money offshore, does not assist with externalising capital and does not repatriate value into South Africa through crypto assets. If a proposed transaction looks like part of an arrangement of that kind, the desk will decline it. That refusal protects you as much as it protects the desk.

14. Tax risk

SARS treats crypto assets as assets of an intangible nature. Gains are taxed on revenue or capital account according to ordinary principles, which turn on your intention, your frequency of trading and the surrounding facts rather than on a special crypto rule. Getting that characterisation wrong changes the rate you pay and can produce an assessment years later, with interest and penalties.

South Africa adopted the OECD Crypto-Asset Reporting Framework with effect from 1 March 2026, and the first return is due to SARS by 31 May 2027. Reporting is a duty of service providers, and it means that transactions you conduct through a compliant desk are visible to SARS whether or not you declare them. Any service that suggests otherwise is offering you a problem, not a benefit.

The supply of a crypto asset is a deemed financial service and is exempt from VAT under section 2(1) of the VAT Act. That exemption applies to the asset, not necessarily to a separate service fee.

The desk does not give tax advice. The tax notice sets out what is reported and what remains yours to declare, and a registered tax practitioner should decide how a specific transaction is treated in your return.

15. Impersonation, social engineering and recovery scams

Statistically, the way a South African most often loses money in this market is not a market move. It is being persuaded to send crypto to somebody who is not who they claim to be.

The patterns repeat. A cloned WhatsApp or Telegram account using the desk's name and profile photograph. An email that appears to continue a real conversation and contains new banking details. A message announcing that a "rate is expiring" and pushing for an immediate transfer. An offer to help you recover a previous loss for an upfront fee. An invitation to a group where strangers post screenshots of returns. And, most damaging of all, an approach that begins as a personal relationship and only later mentions a trading opportunity.

Three rules defeat almost all of it. Verify the channel independently, using the numbers and handles published on the verify our channels page, not the ones in the message you received. Treat urgency itself as the warning sign; a real desk does not need you to act in the next ten minutes, and section 14 of the FAIS General Code of Conduct prohibits manufactured urgency. And never disclose a private key, a seed phrase or a one-time password to anyone, including someone who says they are from this desk.

16. Concentration, and your own circumstances

A risk that no disclosure document can quantify for you is how much of your total position sits in one asset, and what else in your life depends on that money. A loss that is survivable at five percent of net worth is not survivable at eighty percent. Money that is needed for a bond payment in three months behaves differently from money that is not needed at all.

The desk raises this not as advice but because it is the variable that most often turns a market risk into a personal crisis, and because it is the one variable you control entirely before you trade.

17. The desk gives no advice

Conexus Crypto provides an exchange service. It quotes a price, it executes what you instruct, and it settles. It does not give financial, investment, legal or tax advice, and nothing on this website or said by a dealer is a recommendation to buy, sell, hold or avoid any crypto asset at any time or in any amount.

Factual information about how a transaction works, what a network fee is, or how a settlement is timed is not advice. If you want advice about whether a transaction is appropriate for you, obtain it from a financial services provider licensed and mandated to give it, or from a registered tax practitioner, and obtain it before you accept a firm quote.

You are the only person who decides whether to trade. This page exists so that the decision is an informed one.

18. Version and review

Version 1.0. Effective 18 August 2026. Last reviewed 18 August 2026. Next scheduled review 18 August 2027, or sooner if the law changes or a new risk becomes material. Comments on anything this page omits are welcome at support@conexus-crypto.com and will be considered at the next review.