Crypto Fest 2025 was oddly small, but the conversations were not

They — the early critics of ye olde American saloons who used to serve hearty snacks alongside the liquor — said that there’s no such thing as a free lunch. I missed last year’s Crypto Fest at the Cape Town Stadium, so having to pay for my own coffee and snacks at Crypto Fest 2025 came as quite a shock.

I could probably have scored some refreshments had I attended the Bitget workshop, but I was too enthralled by the interesting conversations on the main (and only) stage.

Read more: Crossed Wires: Blockchain — how an unruly teenager matured into adulthood

The excellently named Blake Player, the chief commercial officer at Valr, pointed out the stark contrast to Crypto Fests past: “I would just like to say to the [Bitcoin Events] team [that] this conference has changed a heck of a lot since three years ago when I first came and there were guys rolling up in Lambos … and there were fireworks and DJs … there were cocktails long before this time.”

Player was on stage with Luno country manager Christo de Wit and Bitget’s head of growth, Callan Richardson, just after lunch, and he was correct in saying that at previous events they would have been shouting over the chatter from the cocktail bar at this stage.

“It’s a different cycle. The bitcoin price is higher, but we’ve got fewer cocktails,” he said

Whales are hiding, but the bulls still run  

Cryptocurrency has entered a new market cycle, one where bitcoin and ethereum are being adopted as strategic reserves, which has consequences like being the centre of a geopolitical skirmish where nation-states attack crypto protocols in lieu of imposing economic sanctions.

Carel de Jager, the founding CEO of SilverSixpence, is a solvency auditing specialist and didn’t immediately dismiss that notion. A self-proclaimed “bitcoin bull”, he conceded that the network wasn’t immune to attacks from non-rational actors, such as adversarial nation-states. He explained that while the hash rate was “high”, the price to overpower it was not unthinkable.

“We’re talking, ballpark ... about $20-million a day to attack the network, to do a 51% attack,” he said.

He immediately qualified the figure, saying: “I’m making a lot of assumptions, and some of them are a little bit dangerous.”

The shift in on-stage discourse, from the launch of new tokens and metaverse concepts in the past, to these deep dives into nerd-level minutiae, was remarkable.

Institutions are no longer window-shopping 

The most striking revelation from the Crypto Fest conversations wasn’t about bitcoin’s downward price trajectory or the latest memecoin. It was the quiet acknowledgement that South Africa’s institutional players had stopped investigating and started doing.

“The attitude of institutions, especially at conferences like this … it’s no longer investigation, it’s no longer ‘let’s see what’s happening,’” De Wit observed. “There’s a change of attitude from investigation to actual action.”

News broke last week that Discovery Bank was working with Luno to give clients crypto access, and the reality is that asset managers are investing in crypto-native hedge funds. Private equity firms are putting entire contract structures into smart contracts because the traditional paperwork has become absurdly inefficient for smaller deals.

Making the retail utility case 

The payment statistics tell their own story. Pick n Pay’s head of value-added services, Deven Moodley, on a panel hosted by Binance South Africa MD Hannes Wessels, said crypto transaction volumes had hit 1.4 million — a 44% year-on-year increase — and crucially, the average basket size had decreased.

That’s the metric that matters. When crypto transactions shift from large, experimental purchases to everyday spending, you know something fundamental has changed.

Read more: In case no one’s told you, we’re in a stablecoin race

Even more telling: about a third of crypto payment users are over 45, and the fastest growing region for such transactions is Polokwane. These are no longer tech bros buying energy drinks with bitcoin for the novelty.

Perhaps the most quotable moment of the day came during a discussion about cross-border payments, when someone described the current global financial system with delicious contempt: “Moving money on Swift nowadays is the financial equivalent of trying to send an email via fax.”

It’s a comparison that lands because it’s accurate. The legacy financial infrastructure is creaking, and everyone in the room knows it. The conversation around stablecoins — particularly rand-denominated stablecoins — wasn’t hypothetical futurism. It was practical problem-solving for businesses that need faster, cheaper settlements.

The regulatory elephant 

But then came the sobering reminder that South Africa’s crypto industry is still navigating a regulatory minefield while blindfolded.

The Collective Investment Schemes rules and Regulation 28 are blocking pension and retirement money from entering the crypto space. The SA Revenue Service (SARS) is trying, but as one tax specialist delicately put it, “SARS, from a policy perspective, is not always a pioneer. They often follow market jurisdictions like the US and UK.”

There’s no authoritative guidance on whether crypto gains are capital or income in nature, and the operational challenges are equally thorny. Legacy systems remain entrenched. Talent is expensive and scarce, particularly when competing with UK and US salary packages.

Read more: SA’s crypto regulations hamper investment funds, says Luno GM

Then there’s the uncomfortable estate planning question that one speaker raised: “I can tell you now, my wife and my executor will not have a clue how to find keys [to my crypto wallet].”

It’s the kind of practical concern that doesn’t make headlines but matters enormously if we’re serious about mainstream adoption.

The hope for convergence 

Near the end of the day, someone articulated the industry’s ultimate ambition with beautiful simplicity: “The hope is that we don’t speak about digital finance or blockchain — that we just speak about finance, and there’s that complete merger of these two realms.”

That’s when you’ll know crypto has truly arrived in South Africa — when it becomes boring. When it’s just another payment option, another asset class, another infrastructure layer that nobody thinks about because it simply works.

We’re not there yet. The cocktails are gone, the Lambos have disappeared, and apparently, there is no free lunch. But the conversations are interesting enough to make me linger longer. DM