All live rates
Every asset the desk quotes against the rand, and how the number is built.
BTC / ZAR
Bitcoin, converted
Bitcoin, converted
to rand.
The indicative BTC to ZAR rate below is built from South African order books, not from a dollar price multiplied by USD/ZAR. Below it is the part that matters more once you are actually moving money: how a Bitcoin settlement behaves.
Conexus
Indicative BTC rate
—
BTC / ZAR
Quoted by a dealer
R—
Indicative mid — 1 BTC
R—
Bid — what the desk pays you
R—
Ask — what you pay the desk
Updated — · reference data from VALR, Luno. Indicative only, refreshed about once a minute, and not a binding quote. A firm rate comes from a dealer in writing — ask for one.
Selling Bitcoin for rand
Bitcoin is the asset most people arrive with and the one that behaves least like a bank transfer. It has no reversal, no support desk, no beneficiary name to check against, and no way to recall a payment sent to the wrong place. Everything the desk does around a BTC ticket exists to make those three facts less dangerous: the address is issued in writing, the amount is stated to the satoshi, and the rand does not leave until the chain says the coin arrived.
A trade runs in one direction or the other. Selling, you receive a firm rate, send bitcoin to the address on the confirmed ticket, and rand settles to a South African bank account in your own name once the transaction has the agreed number of confirmations. Buying, the rand arrives first and the bitcoin goes out to an address you control — never to an exchange deposit address belonging to somebody else, and never to a third party.
Confirmations, honestly explained
A confirmation is a block mined on top of the block containing your transaction. One confirmation means your transaction is in the chain; three means it would take a substantial and expensive reorganisation to remove it. Blocks arrive on average every ten minutes, but the interval is random: two blocks four minutes apart and then a forty-minute gap is an ordinary afternoon. Nothing has failed, and calling the dealer will not make a block arrive faster.
The desk's confirmation requirement scales with size. A modest ticket clears on fewer confirmations than a very large one, for the straightforward reason that the cost of attacking a settlement rises with what the attacker stands to gain. The number that applies to your trade is stated on the ticket before you send anything.
Indicative quote
Live
You send
You receive
ZAR
Indicative only. This is not an offer or a binding quote. It excludes network fees, banking charges and the outcome of compliance checks. A firm rate is valid only once confirmed in writing by a dealer. Crypto assets are volatile and investing in crypto assets may result in the loss of capital.
Fee behaviour: the counter-intuitive part
Bitcoin fees are quoted in satoshis per virtual byte. They price the space your transaction occupies in a block, and are completely indifferent to how much value it carries. This has consequences that catch out people who are used to percentage-based banking charges:
- Value does not drive cost. Moving the rand equivalent of R5,000,000 in one transaction can cost the same as moving R50,000. On a large ticket, the network fee is economically irrelevant; on a small one, it can be a meaningful percentage.
- Your wallet's history drives cost. A wallet that received one large payment spends one input. A wallet that received four hundred small payments may have to spend dozens of them, producing a transaction several kilobytes long and a fee to match. If you have been accumulating in small amounts for years, expect a larger fee than the person next to you moving the same value.
- Congestion drives cost. The mempool is a queue. When it is full, the fee required to be included in the next few blocks rises, sometimes sharply and within minutes. Under-paying does not fail the transaction; it parks it.
- Under-paying is recoverable, but not by us. If your transaction is stuck, the remedies are replace-by-fee from the sending wallet or child-pays-for-parent from the receiving one. Neither is something the desk can do on your behalf, because neither of us controls your sending wallet.
Send the fee, do not send the shortfall
Where the fee is deducted from the amount sent rather than added to it, the desk receives less bitcoin than the ticket states. That is not a rounding issue — it is a different trade, and it has to be re-quoted at the rate prevailing when it is discovered. Always send the exact figure on the ticket and pay the network fee on top of it.
What the desk checks before rand moves
Bitcoin is a public ledger, which cuts both ways. It means the desk can see where a coin has been, and it means the desk is required to look. Under the FIC Act, Conexus is an accountable institution and must perform customer due diligence and understand the source of funds before a transaction concludes. On the chain side that means screening the sending address and its recent history against sanctions and known-illicit clusters. This is not a judgement about you. It is the same check every regulated counterparty in the chain will run afterwards, and it is better for both of us that it happens before settlement rather than after.
FIC Directive 9 of 2024 — in force since 30 April 2025, with no minimum threshold — also requires originator and beneficiary information to travel with a transfer between institutions. Below R5,000 a reduced information set applies and the ordering institution need not verify it. That is verification relief. It is not anonymity, and nobody should sell it to you as such.
Sizing a Bitcoin ticket in a thin market
The South African bitcoin book is not deep. Working a large order through a retail exchange means your own bids or offers become the market, and the average fill drifts away from the price you saw on the screen when you started. This is the entire reason an OTC desk exists: the desk prices the whole ticket in one number, takes the execution risk onto its own book, and tells you in advance what the rate will be. If you are moving more than about R1,000,000 of bitcoin, read large-volume trades before you decide how to execute.
Settlement
How a BTC settlement runs.
Conexus
Indicative BTC rate
—
BTC / ZAR
Quoted by a dealer
01
Firm quote in writing
The dealer confirms rate, amount to the satoshi, the destination address, the confirmation requirement and the window the rate is held for. Minutes, not hours.
02
You verify the address independently
Read the address back on a second channel before sending. Address substitution by malware is the single most common way South Africans lose bitcoin. Two minutes well spent.
03
Broadcast and confirm
You send, the desk watches the transaction ID, and the agreed number of confirmations accrues. You get the transaction ID back on the ticket. Typically under an hour.
04
Rand settles
ZAR is paid to an account in your own name by EFT, RTC or PayShap, with a written confirmation stating the rate, gross, net and reference. Same business day.
Timings describe the ordinary case. Network congestion, banking cut-off times and compliance queries can extend any of them, and the dealer tells you when that happens rather than letting you wonder.
BTC to ZAR questions
The rate is agreed in minutes. The blockchain is the slow part. Bitcoin produces a block roughly every ten minutes on average, and the desk waits for a set number of confirmations before releasing rand — usually two or three for an ordinary ticket, more for a very large one. Budget an hour from the moment you broadcast, and remember that "on average every ten minutes" is a statistical statement: a single gap of forty minutes between blocks is entirely normal and is not a sign that anything has gone wrong.
Because an unconfirmed Bitcoin transaction is a proposal, not a fact. Most wallets now signal replace-by-fee, which means the sender can broadcast a competing version of the same transaction with a higher fee and have it mined instead. Confirmations are what turn a proposal into settlement. Any desk that pays out on a zero-confirmation transfer is taking a risk on your behalf, and eventually somebody pays for that.
No, and this surprises people. A Bitcoin fee is charged per unit of transaction size in bytes, not per rand of value. Sending an amount worth R50,000 and an amount worth R5,000,000 can cost exactly the same, because both are the same shape on the wire. What actually drives your fee up is the number of inputs your wallet has to spend — a wallet that has accumulated hundreds of small receipts builds a physically larger transaction and pays for every byte of it.
Native SegWit (bc1q…), Taproot (bc1p…), P2SH (3…) and legacy (1…). The dealer gives you the destination address in writing on the confirmed ticket, and you should verify it against a second channel before sending. Bitcoin addresses are case-sensitive in the legacy formats and have no memo or tag field — if a counterparty asks you for a "memo" on a Bitcoin transfer, stop and ask why.
The desk can settle over Lightning for smaller tickets where a channel of adequate capacity exists, which makes the transfer effectively instant. Lightning is not suited to a large single payment, because the payment has to find a route with enough liquidity along its whole length. Ask the dealer before you assume it is available for your size.
That is precisely what the firm quote exists to prevent. When a dealer confirms a rate in writing, they also confirm the window it is held for and what happens if the transfer arrives outside that window. Nothing is re-priced silently. If your transfer misses the window, you are told, and you are re-quoted before anything settles.
No. Bitcoin divides to eight decimal places, so a ticket is sized in rand and expressed to whatever fraction of a bitcoin that comes to. Send the exact amount on the confirmed ticket — sending a rounded figure creates a mismatch that has to be reconciled manually and delays your settlement.
Keep reading
Fees and limits
The spread ladder, network fees, bank charges and what the desk never charges.
Cashing out in South Africa
The practical route from a wallet to a South African bank account.
Get a firm BTC to ZAR rate.
Tell the desk the size and direction. You get a binding rate in writing, the destination address, and the confirmation requirement before anything moves.
Investing in crypto assets may result in the loss of capital, as the value is variable and can go up as well as down. A crypto asset is not legal tender and does not fall within the National Payment System Act. Conexus Crypto provides an exchange service only and does not provide financial, investment or tax advice.