South Africa's central bank is seeking to regulate cryptocurrencies and possibly issue a central bank digital currency.For crypto, "Our view has changed and we now regard it as a financial asset and we hope to regulate it as a financial asset," Kuben Naidoo, deputy governor of the South African Reserve Bank, said Wednesday at a PSG Think Big webinar. Naidoo noted that regulations could take 12 to 18 months to take effect, though "I think we can start to have some KYC rules. We can start to license exchanges." His remarks come as the South African rand has weakened as much as 9% against the U.S. dollar in the past month alone amid fears of a recession in the U.S. In addition, Naidoo hinted that the country may issue a central bank digital currency, a digital representation of a fiat currency like the rand. "The issue about whether the central bank itself should issue a digital currency, and we are experimenting, we are learning," Naidoo said. "We've had two pilots we've done. We've created a central bank digital currency in a test environment ... But I think we are probably several years away from that," he added. Looking at intraday price action in the crypto world, bitcoin (BTC-USD) flipped back to positive territory after slipping earlier on Wednesday's session, rising 0.5% to $19.8K as of shortly before 3:00 p.m. ET. Likewise, ethereum (ETH-USD) +2.7% is climbing to $1.08K over the past 24 hours. In December 2021, South Africa planned to unveil crypto rules in 2022.
