It’s always been easy to have an opinion about cryptocurrency. For a long time, that opinion depended almost entirely on when you got into it. Enter the market at the right moment, and you’re a visionary. Come in at the wrong one, and you become a cautionary tale. What’s changed, slowly and then all at once, is that the market has grown too large and too embedded in real financial infrastructure for either of those positions to hold. This is the first edition of Crypto, and we didn’t want to launch it by resolving the debate between believers and sceptics. That argument has become less interesting than the one now taking place inside the market itself: between utility and speculation, access and risk, between a technology that promises to reshape finance and the very human tendency to misunderstand what we own until it costs us. The South African context gives these questions a particular texture. Regulation arrived. Banks are making decisions. Millions of people are transacting in crypto, many of them for the first time, through platforms designed to feel as familiar as a banking app. Pick n Pay accepts Bitcoin. SAA accepts crypto payments. These are data points in a shift that’s already under way. What we’ve tried to do across these pages is to treat that shift seriously. We spoke to regulators, exchange operators, asset managers, economists and investors. The questions asked weren’t whether crypto matters, but how it works, who it serves, where it fails and what comes next. Those are harder questions than the ones crypto media usually asks. We think they’re the right ones. Brendon Petersen, Editor Browse through the full magazine below (zoom in or go full screen for ease of reading):