JOHN ENDRES | Reserve Bank’s crypto register puts holders in harm’s way

If you own cryptocurrency the Reserve Bank wants to know. The draft Capital Flow Management Regulations, issued by the National Treasury, would require a holder to declare crypto within 30 days and say where it is kept. Regulation 10, as published, sets no minimum threshold for disclosure.

Under the draft Crypto Asset Manual, issued jointly by the Reserve Bank and National Treasury, trading platforms would have to record each client’s home address and ID number and make the records available to the central bank within 48 hours as a spreadsheet.

Criminals would pay well for such a list. In January 2025 kidnappers seized David Balland, a cofounder of the French wallet maker Ledger, and cut off one of his fingers in the process of demanding a €10m ransom. France recorded 77 crypto-related kidnappings and extortion cases in the first half of this year, according to its interior minister, up from 45 in 2025.

South African gangs are familiar with the method. Police recorded 17,061 kidnappings in 2023/24, up from 4,692 nine years earlier, according to the Institute for Security Studies. Many were express kidnappings, in which gangs hold victims until their bank accounts are empty. Crypto suits that method better than a bank account does.