Publishing Verified Trader Performance — South Africa Regulatory Overview

How NakedPnL is positioned in South Africa under the FSCA, SARB, the FAIS Act, the FSR Act, the 2022 declaration of crypto-assets as a financial product, and POPIA.

NakedPnL operates a public registry of verified investment performance produced by individual traders who voluntarily connect read-only exchange API keys or sign on-chain wallet attestations. Daily NAV snapshots feed a time-weighted return (TWR) calculation; results are recorded in an append-only, SHA-256 chained ledger and Merkle-anchored to Bitcoin via OpenTimestamps so any third party can independently re-verify them.

This page describes how that activity is positioned under South African law, with reference to the Financial Sector Conduct Authority (FSCA), the South African Reserve Bank (SARB), the Financial Advisory and Intermediary Services Act 37 of 2002 (FAIS Act), the Financial Sector Regulation Act 9 of 2017 (FSR Act), the Government Gazette declaration of crypto-assets as a financial product, and the Protection of Personal Information Act 4 of 2013 (POPIA).

How NakedPnL is classified in South Africa

NakedPnL's activity is the production and distribution of factual performance data. The platform is not licensed by the FSCA as an FSP under the FAIS Act in any of the categories — Category I (advice and intermediary services for non-discretionary products), Category II (discretionary FSP), Category IIA (hedge fund FSP), Category III (administrative FSP), or Category IV (assistance business FSP) — and does not appear in the FSCA Financial Services Provider register.

Advice and intermediary services under FAIS section 1

The FAIS Act defines advice in section 1 as any recommendation, guidance, or proposal of a financial nature furnished by any means or medium to any client or group of clients in respect of the purchase, investment in, or termination of any financial product, the variation of any term or condition applying to a financial product, or any other action that may result in the conclusion of a transaction in respect of any financial product. The definition is broad, but is anchored to a financial product.

Section 1 also defines intermediary services as any act other than the furnishing of advice that is performed by a person for or on behalf of a client or product supplier, the result of which is to bring about, manage, or maintain a financial product. Both advice and intermediary services require an FSP licence under FAIS section 7. The General Code of Conduct for Authorised FSPs and Representatives (Board Notice 80 of 2003) sets out the conduct-of-business framework.

NakedPnL does not produce client-specific outputs. The registry shows the same content to every reader of a given page; the platform does not collect a client's financial situation or risk profile and does not run a needs analysis or suitability assessment. The activity is the publication of past performance data of consenting traders. On those facts, the platform's analysis is that the published content is general information rather than advice furnished to a client or group of clients in respect of a financial product.

Crypto-assets as a financial product (October 2022 Gazette)

By Government Gazette Notice 1639 of 19 October 2022, the Minister of Finance, on the recommendation of the FSCA, declared crypto-assets to be a financial product under section 1(h) of the FAIS Act. The declaration extends the scope of advice and intermediary services to crypto-assets: persons providing advice or intermediary services in respect of crypto-assets, on a regular basis and for compensation, are now within the FSP licensing perimeter under FAIS, subject to transitional provisions and FSCA exemptions.

The October 2022 declaration matters for this analysis because it brings crypto-asset advice clearly within the FAIS Act's scope. NakedPnL's posture remains that it does not provide advice as defined in section 1 — it does not furnish recommendations, guidance, or proposals to clients on the purchase, investment in, or termination of any specific crypto-asset, and does not provide intermediary services. The registry publishes factual past-performance data of consenting traders, including those whose track records may include crypto-asset positions, without any product-specific recommendation or call to action.

FSR Act and the Twin Peaks framework

The Financial Sector Regulation Act 9 of 2017 (FSR Act) implemented the Twin Peaks regulatory framework in South Africa, establishing the FSCA as the market-conduct authority and the Prudential Authority (housed within SARB) as the prudential supervisor for banks, insurers, and certain other financial institutions. NakedPnL is not a financial institution within the meaning of the FSR Act and is not subject to direct prudential or market-conduct supervision under the Act. The general market-conduct standards set by the FSCA under the FSR Act apply to FSCA-supervised firms.

What NakedPnL does not do

• No copy trading. The platform cannot replicate a trader's positions into another user's account.
• No advice in respect of financial products under FAIS section 1.
• No intermediary services under FAIS section 1.
• No discretionary or administrative FSP activity under FAIS Categories II, IIA, or III.
• No collective investment scheme management under the Collective Investment Schemes Control Act.
• No deposit-taking activity under the Banks Act.
• No custody of crypto-assets, fiat, or financial instruments.
• No participation in registered crypto-asset CASPs in any operational capacity.

These design choices are encoded as feature flags in the codebase and protected by a continuous-integration test that fails the build if any flag is changed.

What South African users should know

South African users should treat the registry as factual performance data. Past performance is not necessarily a reliable indicator of future performance — a phrase the FSCA expects authorised FSPs to display alongside past-performance information. NakedPnL applies an equivalent statement on every trader profile.

If a third party offers to manage your money based on a NakedPnL track record, that party is responsible for its own FSP licensing under the FAIS Act. Check the FSCA Financial Services Provider register and the FSCA's warnings (publications and notices on unauthorised firms) before transacting with any firm that holds itself out as authorised. NakedPnL does not vouch for any third-party manager.

Personal information: POPIA and the Information Regulator

The Protection of Personal Information Act 4 of 2013 (POPIA) regulates the processing of personal information in South Africa. The eight conditions for lawful processing in Chapter 3 — accountability, processing limitation, purpose specification, further processing limitation, information quality, openness, security safeguards, and data subject participation — apply to all responsible parties. The Information Regulator is the supervisory authority and may investigate complaints, issue enforcement notices, and impose administrative fines under POPIA Chapter 11.

Lawful processing under POPIA requires either consent, contractual necessity, compliance with a legal obligation, the legitimate interests of the responsible party or a third party, or one of the other grounds in section 11. The platform relies on contract performance for users with an account, on legitimate interests for minimal aggregated analytics, and on explicit consent for the public listing of a trader's handle and TWR series in the registry. Withdrawing public-listing consent removes the registry entry from public endpoints. Users can exercise rights of access (section 23 POPIA), correction or deletion (section 24 POPIA), and objection (section 11(3) POPIA) through the privacy contact, and may complain to the Information Regulator.

Tax considerations

NakedPnL is not a South African financial intermediary and does not produce IT3 certificates or pre-filled tax declarations. Capital gains for individuals are taxed under the Income Tax Act 58 of 1962, with crypto-asset gains characterised by SARS as either capital or revenue in nature depending on intention and holding period. A SAICA-registered Chartered Accountant or SAIT-registered tax practitioner is the right resource for specific questions.

Disclaimer variant for South Africa

South Africa is not currently mapped in lib/jurisdictions.ts; users with a South African IP fall through to the default disclaimer variant, which presents the standard publisher disclaimer without an EU- or UK-specific notice. The default variant is intentionally conservative and emphasises that NakedPnL is a publisher of verified factual data, not a financial-services provider. A South Africa-specific variant may be added once the platform completes a more detailed South African legal review, particularly given the evolving crypto-asset perimeter following the October 2022 declaration.

Frequently asked questions