Morocco banned crypto in 2017. Ownership went from 3.65 to 6 million

Our regulation map carries five African countries. Four of them ban crypto outright and one licenses it. Read the five entries next to each other and the bans have not changed what people do.

Morocco: the ban that grew the market

Bank Al-Maghrib prohibited all cryptocurrency transactions in 2017 and the Office des Changes fined people for breaking the rule. Since then the number of owners in Morocco went from 3.65 million to 6 million, roughly one resident in six.

“The 2017 ban did not hold: the number of crypto owners grew from 3.65 to 6 million, roughly one resident in six. That figure is what pushed the authorities to draft a law.”

— Our Morocco entry, intokened.com/en/regulation/morocco, checked 21 August 2026

That figure is what pushed the authorities to write a law. Bill 42.25 appeared in November 2025 and parliament has not adopted it.

Egypt: three million people ignoring the central bank

The Central Bank of Egypt banned trading and use, and Article 206 of Law 194 of 2020 requires a central bank approval that no entity has ever received. Breaking it costs between 1 million and 10 million pounds plus prison.

More than 3 million residents hold crypto anyway. Dar al-Ifta issued a fatwa in 2018 declaring bitcoin trading impermissible, which stacked a religious prohibition on top of the legal one.

Algeria: holding it is the crime

Algeria prohibited crypto in its 2018 finance law and then went further. Law 25-10 of 24 July 2025 turned buying, selling, using, holding, mining, storing and promoting into criminal offences carrying two months to a year in prison, doubled for a repeat.

Owning a wallet is enough. Across the seven bans on our map, Algeria is the only entry where holding by itself is an offence, though Tunisia carries the longer sentence.

Tunisia: a digital dinar and a five-year sentence

Tunisia treats crypto transactions as unauthorised operations under a currency-control code written in 1976, with penalties reaching five years. A new currency code has sat before parliament since October 2025 and would let residents declare holdings.

The country also ran one of Africa's earliest central bank blockchain experiments in 2018, a digital dinar, while threatening those five years for trading crypto.

South Africa: the one that licensed instead

South Africa took the other route. The FSCA has required crypto providers to hold a licence since 2023 and treats crypto as a financial product, which makes it one of the continent's most active markets.

The tax follows ordinary rules rather than a special regime. Trading profit meets your marginal rate up to 45%, a long-term gain counts as capital with a 40% inclusion that caps the effective rate near 18%, and the first R50,000 of gain each year is exempt.

Licensing did not make it safe. Mirror Trading International took $588 million in bitcoin from hundreds of thousands of investors and was, by Chainalysis's count, the largest crypto scam in the world in 2020.

What our map is missing

Crypto in Africa reaches our map through five countries, and five countries is not a continent. Nigeria, Kenya and Ghana sit near the top of most adoption rankings and appear nowhere in our entries, which is a gap in our work rather than a fact about Africa.

We checked the Egyptian, Moroccan, Algerian and Tunisian pages on 21 August and the South African one the day before. Yesterday we ran the same exercise on India's tax structure. The three African countries we are missing are next.

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.