The pan-African financial services giant Old Mutual launched a survey entitled "2018 Savings and Investment Monitor" aimed at residents of South Africa. The report indicates that 38% of residents and citizens of the second largest economy in Africa would have wished they had invested their money in cryptocurrencies beforehand.
South Africans also expressed a positive sentiment regarding digital currencies in general, with 71% of respondents stating that "you can earn a lot of money with them." However, there are also 43% of South Africans who compared them with fraudulent pyramid schemes.
Regarding the knowledge of the existence of cryptocurrencies, 60% of South Africans said in the survey that they had no idea of its existence, while the percentage of those who demonstrated a high level of knowledge of cryptocurrencies was only 4%. Those whose knowledge about currencies was low accounted for 17% of the total, while 19% learned about them recently.
The Old Mutual survey is based on data obtained through Google Trends, which shows that, based on Bitcoin's online searches, South Africa had the highest level of interest in the world in the main cryptocurrency, Bitcoin , over the past 12 months.
As detailed in May, a survey conducted by the South African technology magazine MyBroadband revealed that almost 50% of those who were not in possession of digital assets or who never had had planned to invest in them this year 2018.
Of the respondents who do not own or who have never had cryptocurrencies, almost 50% said they plan to invest in at least one cryptocurrency or some form of cryptography in 2018. "
Perhaps due to the popularity of cryptocurrencies in the country and the greater adoption in relation to other African countries, the South African Revenue Service (SARS) demanded at the end of April that taxpayers declare the profits or losses that they have obtained from the cryptocurrencies as part of your taxable income. At that time, SARS indicated that cryptocurrencies were intangible assets, not currencies. In the case of cryptocurrency miners, the tax agency ordered mined coins to be treated as "commercial shares" until they were exchanged or sold for cash.
The deputy governor of the Reserve Bank of South Africa, Francois Groepe, seemed to agree with SARS in May, as he claimed that the central bank did not consider the cryptocurrencies as coins because they allegedly did not meet the money requirements. Instead, Groepe said, SARS would refer to them as "cibertokens."