BlockTower, the issuer of the rand-backed stablecoin ZARU, said on Thursday that Luno has listed ZARU/USDT and ZARU/USDC trading pairs on its exchange, putting the rand on a continuous order book against the world’s two largest dollar stablecoins. Three days earlier, national treasury and the South African Reserve Bank published a draft manual that would bar South African companies from moving crypto across the border at all.

BlockTower’s pitch is aimed squarely at the constituency those rules would exclude. The company says “treasuries and trading desks” can now “move size in and out of ZARU at attractive spreads, around the clock”, and that the new pairs amount to “rand FX moving on-chain”. Under the draft Crypto Assets Manual for cross-border activities, published on 3 August, only natural persons may transact offshore in crypto, using the R2-million single discretionary allowance or the R10-million foreign capital allowance. Resident entities “may not enter into crypto asset transactions deemed as import or export of capital”.

If the draft is adopted as written, South African corporate treasuries would be the one group unable to use the international leg of the market ZARU has just opened.

The pairs are open to Luno customers in South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya and Uganda, with more markets to follow “as regulation permits”. Currency Hub, a licensed financial services provider and crypto asset service provider, will quote two-way prices as market maker.

The parties

The parties on both sides of the listing are the same parties. BlockTower has three shareholders. Two of them are Luno, the exchange doing the listing, and Sanlam, whose asset management arm runs ZARU’s reserves. The third has not been named. BlockTower CEO Vighnesh Patel came from Luno, where he was an independent member of its digital asset listing committee – the body that decides which tokens the exchange lists – and resigned that seat on taking the job.

In other words, an exchange part-owns the issuer whose token it has just listed; the issuer’s reserve manager is also its shareholder; and the issuer’s chief executive came off the exchange’s listings committee. None of that is unlawful, and all of it is disclosed in pieces. Assembled, it describes a market in a rand currency substitute in which a small number of institutions occupy most of the seats.

Read: VALR hits back at proposed cross-border crypto ban

BlockTower declined to comment on the draft rules or to compare ZARU with rival rand stablecoins. Its shareholder was less reticent. Marius Reitz, Luno’s GM for Africa and Europe, said the manual “effectively prohibits companies from making cross-border payments with cryptocurrencies”, cutting South African firms off from stablecoin use “for any form of cross-border commercial transactions, supply chain payments or international trade”.

“Stablecoins enable instant low-cost cross-border business-to-business payments and are one of the biggest use cases for cryptocurrencies, in a global industry with annual transaction volumes estimated at US$33-trillion,” Reitz said. “Failing to accommodate corporate cross-border stablecoin payments leaves South African businesses out of step with an international ecosystem embracing next-generation payment rails.

Luno's Marius Reitz — Luno’s Marius Reitz

BlockTower calls this the first listing of an institutional-grade rand stablecoin on a large regulated exchange. That rests on a narrow reading. ZAR Supercoin, issued by NYSE-listed Super Group’s Super Money SA and backed by rand reserves at Absa, was announced as tradeable on Luno in November 2025. ZARU itself has been on Luno since its 3 February launch – first over the counter to qualified institutions, later to retail customers through Luno’s instant trade feature and EasyEquities. What is new is the order book.

The draft has no legal effect yet. Comment closes on 30 September and the manual cannot be implemented until the Capital Flow Management Regulations are promulgated. Those regulations, gazetted on 17 April, drew heavy industry fire, with VALR CEO Farzam Ehsani calling the draft “an alarming document” and asking whether a rand-denominated token that lives on a public blockchain would be treated as a foreign asset simply because of where it sits.

That question now hangs directly over ZARU. A ZARU/USDT trade is, in economic terms, a rand-for-dollar transaction. Whether the authorities read it as domestic activity or as capital export is not settled by the draft.

ZARU is not South Africa’s first rand stablecoin. That distinction belongs to ZARP, which launched in 2021 and was built from the opposite end of the market. Co-founded by Simon Dingle and Kenny Inggs, it is issued by ZARP Stablecoin, which operates as a representative of the licensed financial services provider Inves Capital, and its treasury is managed by Old Mutual Wealth, which also injected liquidity into the token in 2023. It was designed for decentralised finance: its liquidity sits mainly in on-chain pools, and it runs natively on Ethereum, Base, Polygon and Solana. Its dashboard showed R81.5-million in circulation this week. Its crypto asset service provider licence is listed as pending.

Pretoria’s call

ZARU took the institutional route, launching in February with Sanlam, Luno, EasyEquities and Lesaka Technologies attached. Its reserves are managed by Sanlam Specialised Asset Management, held at Standard Bank and attested monthly by Moore Johannesburg. The most recent attestation records 58.4 million ZARU in issue at the end of June.

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Both are small. Research published in June by Keyrock and Bitso puts the supply of all non-dollar stablecoins combined at $2.2-billion, up roughly 50-fold since 2023.