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What TO Know:
- Luno Pay South Africa has processed more than 100,000 completed payments totalling over R75 million in rand-denominated transaction value.
- The payment feature is accepted at nearly one million merchant locations nationwide, including grocery stores, filling stations, and online retailers.
- Users can spend supported cryptocurrencies alongside ZARU, a rand-pegged stablecoin backed 1:1 by South African rand reserves.
- The growth highlights a gradual shift in South Africa’s digital asset market from speculative trading toward everyday retail spending.
Luno Global announced that it had completed 100,000 payments and processed over R75 million in rand payments via Luno Pay. The company describes the milestone as a sign that “crypto is making its way into everyday life.”
This milestone comes alongside a recent surge in crypto and stablecoin activity for South Africa. Luno says LunoPay is now accessible across an estimated one million merchants in the country, including grocery stores and gas stations.
How Luno Pay Works
One of the factors behind Luno Pay’s recent milestone is the ease of use. Merchants don’t need to overhaul their PoS hardware or manage crypto wallets directly, as Luno Pay integrates with established South African QR payment networks.
These payment networks include MoneyBadger, Zapper and Scan to Pay. This lets customers complete payments through checkout systems they already know.
To use Luno Pay at participating merchants, users simply need to open the Luno app, select the payment option, scan the merchant’s QR code, and choose which of the available crypto wallets to debit. The merchant receives the payments in Rands, which protects them from exposure to crypto price volatility.
ZARU Brings Rand Stablecoin Payments Into the Mix
ZARU is a rand-backed stablecoin. The coin launched in February 2026 as a collaboration between Luno, Sanlam, Easy Equities and Lesaka. In September, Absa Bank joined Standard Bank as a second banking partner for the stablecoin.
The introduction of a stablecoin tied to the rand changed the landscape of crypto retail payments. Previously, users who wanted to make crypto payments had to use coins such as Bitcoin, which exposed them to the coin’s price volatility, or USDT, which exposed them to dollar-rand fluctuations.
Luno’s tie to ZARU also gave the coin access to Luno’s existing relationships and infrastructure. To drive use, Luno also introduced various incentives, including zero fees for ZAR/ZARU swaps and cashback rewards of up to 15% in Tether Gold (XAUT) on payments of R100 and above.
In September, MoneyBadger published a report showing a 176% growth in crypto payments in H1 2026. The report also showed that Bitcoin’s share of crypto spending dropped from 94% in 2023 to 40% in 2026. Most notably, stablecoin spending grew from 2% to 44% in the same period, driven by ZARU and USDT usage.
Luno Pay’s Trajectory Shows Growing Retail Demand
In October 2025, Luno reported completing an estimated 48,000 payments, processing R28 million across 1,600 merchants. At the time, the service was available to an estimated 700,000 merchants. As of November 2026, those numbers have doubled.
This retail growth sits within a much larger domestic stablecoin market and crypto economy. The South African Reserve Bank (SARB) published its Financial Stability Review in June 2026. The report noted that on-chain Tether (USDT) transactions across major local exchanges reached an estimated R27 billion in the year to April 30, 2026.
Chainalysis’s 2026 report shows 52% growth in South Africa’s crypto economy, with transaction volume surging to $39.3 billion, the largest in the continent.
What Luno Pay’s Growth Means for Crypto Adoption in Africa
One lesson other domestic stablecoin issuers and crypto payment infrastructure can take from South Africa’s experience is that adoption surges with integration. Rather than waiting for merchants to adopt stand-alone blockchain terminals, partnering with existing mobile money and QR payment aggregators removes the largest adoption bottleneck on the merchant side.
The integration with a rand-backed stablecoin also means users could interact with a cryptocurrency that felt more familiar and had no conversion volatility. A system that could be adopted in countries with local-currency-denominated stablecoins like Nigeria and cNGN. What remains to be seen is whether the growth continues when incentives such as cashbacks no longer exist
