South African cryptocurrency traders are now able to buy Ethereum using rands directly on the Luno exchange at launch fees of between 0% and 0,2%.

Marius Reitz, Luno’s GM: Africa, says that a direct Ethereum/rand pair will make it quicker, simpler and cheaper for customers to interact with and use Ethereum on the exchange.

“We are working on a number of enhancements to our platform and this pairing has been introduced in response to demand from our customers. Previously, customers could buy Ethereum through our instant buy option but having this ability directly on the exchange makes it faster and cheaper for traders,” he says.

There are several use cases for Ethereum aimed at automating daily processes and removing the middlemen from the systems we use making everyday life more efficient and cost-effective. These range from legal and finance, to medical and more.

Luno supports bitcoin and Ethereum. According to Reitz, there are over 2 000 cryptocurrencies. “However, many of these are scams, so customers need to trust that the exchange they use has verified the track records of cryptocurrencies available on their platforms.

“Luno limits the currencies on offer to those on which we have completed extensive research and due diligence and we are satisfied with their credibility in terms of security and adoption. Luno will be adding additional cryptocurrencies to its platform later this year,” he explains.

Ethereum is a public, peer-to-peer network or blockchain. Ethereum is the second largest cryptocurrency by market cap.

Ethereum is designed to store different types of data. This data can be used by computers running on the Ethereum blockchain. These programs are called decentralised apps, or dApps.

Developers around the world can build and run decentralised applications on the Ethereum blockchain. The purpose of these is to improve finance, personal information storage, governance and other industries by using the transparent nature of blockchain.