SIMON BROWN: I’m chatting with Marius Reitz. He is of course GM for Luno in Africa. Marius, I appreciate the time today. If we go back to early 2020, if memory serves, a bunch of South African banks kind of unilaterally decided they wouldn’t deal with crypto exchanges. We’ve just had the South African Reserve Bank Prudential Authority basically say, ‘no, it’s fine, banks can work with crypto exchanges in South Africa’.
At Luno we’ve experienced this first- hand in markets like Malaysia and Nigeria where as soon as the ban is put in place, you don’t really see a change in customer behaviour.
And I think in South Africa the regulators have done a great job, the FSCA, the Financial Diligence Centre and the SA Reserve Bank. They’ve all worked in tandem.So I think we are working towards that point. And I must point out that there’s been a lot of private-public sector collaboration as well with regulators trying to understand the industry, but better trying to understand how they should regulate to address the risks – and I think that’s a key point.
MARIUS REITZ: It’s a change to the protocol. So the Ethereum merge, which is the major software update that we have been anticipating and, as you rightly said, it will move from a proof of work to a proof of stake – not the steak that you eat, but the proof-of-stake consensus mechanism. That should happen sometime in September. It’s been in the works for around seven years.