South African High Court Holds Bitcoin Is “Money” and “Capital” Under Exchange Controls
South Africa’s Gauteng High Court held that Bitcoin qualified as both “money” and “capital” for purposes of the country’s exchange-control regime. The decision upheld forfeiture orders arising from the transfer of nearly 1,680 BTC from South Africa to wallets on foreign exchanges and expressly rejected contrary reasoning from an earlier 2025 judgment.
On June 1, 2026, the Gauteng Division of the High Court of South Africa issued a reportable judgment in Mangundhla and Another v South African Reserve Bank and Others holding that Bitcoin is both “money” and “capital” for purposes of South Africa’s Exchange Control Regulations. The case arose from Reserve Bank forfeiture orders tied to Bitcoin that had been purchased in South Africa and transferred to wallets accessible through foreign cryptocurrency exchanges.
The underlying transactions were substantial. Between January 2018 and March 2020, Square Mangundhla used his own Luno account and an account belonging to Fungai Dangaiso to move just under 1,680 bitcoin, then worth just under R182 million, to wallets associated with exchanges registered outside South Africa. The applicants argued that the exchange-control rules did not reach cryptocurrency because it was neither money nor capital and because moving Bitcoin to a foreign-exchange wallet did not amount to exporting capital.
Justice Stuart Wilson rejected that position. The court reasoned that the exchange-control system is intended to prevent unregulated movement of financial capital out of South Africa and that excluding Bitcoin would create a straightforward way to evade those controls. The judgment also expressly disagreed with the Gauteng High Court’s 2025 Standard Bank decision, which had concluded that cryptocurrency was neither money nor capital under the same regulatory framework. Wilson called that earlier conclusion clearly wrong and held that the Bitcoin transfers at issue were capital exports that fell within the regulations.
The ruling mattered to Bitcoin because it was not merely a generic cryptocurrency judgment. Bitcoin was the asset before the court, the court analyzed its economic function directly, and the decision placed Bitcoin squarely inside an established sovereign capital-control regime. It also demonstrated how courts could apply older financial statutes to Bitcoin without waiting for a Bitcoin-specific law, creating a significant legal reference point for the treatment of Bitcoin in South Africa.