David Gitonga of BitKE is a force of nature, leading the crusade for crypto adoption across the region.

There are suspicions that he may not be dead at all. An on-the-scene investigation by Stephen Timm, who went to Brazil to see if Steynberg is alive or dead, exposes more weirdness than we could have anticipated.

Noah Perlman, chief compliance officer at Binance, talks about how the company is working with law enforcement and regulators to bring crypto into the regulated age. This follows the recent release of Binance founder Changpeng Zhao from imprisonment in the US for violating money laundering rules on the world's largest crypto exchange.

One way to eliminate fraudulent university degrees is to post them on the blockchain for everyone to see. Two entrepreneurs – Shahid Hussein of Alchemial and Shan Han of Open Campus – are tackling education from different directions and posting the way to a brave new world of learning using the blockchain.

Two hundred twenty-five licences have been issued in the last year, more than 100 companies withdrew their applications, and eight were declined. Deepfake scams are becoming alarmingly sophisticated, and scammers are making full use of social media to fool the unwitting, says Gerhard van Deventer, head of enforcement at the Financial Sector Conduct Authority.

This is now one of the longest periods bitcoin has remained trapped in a relatively narrow range. The longer this goes on, the more explosive the move. Shiven Moodley, macro strategist at 80eight, expects a decisive move to the upside in the next few months.

Stablecoins, backed by real-world assets such as the US dollar, are on a rampage. Jon Ovadia, CEO of crypto exchange OVEX, explains how USD-backed stablecoin Tether, with just 100 employees, recently surpassed Goldman Sachs in terms of profitability. This, says Ovadia, will soon become a multi-trillion dollar business and account for most cross-border transactions.

Louis Nel, co-host of the G-Crypt social media channel, talks about the emergence of some new and alarming scams, often using crypto vulnerabilities.

Katie Ananina of Plan B passport explains some recent updates to Portugal's Golden Visa programme that permits an investment into a bitcoin fund as a route to an EU passport. It seems other countries are eyeing this development with interest too.

Waheed Adam, chairperson of iTouch, explains that the threats from AI and deep fakes are very real, and how one multinational company lost $25 million to a deep fake fraudster pretending to be the CEO. iTouch has developed a digital authentication system using tokenisation to beat this disturbing trend.

Farzam Ehsani, CEO of crypto exchange VALR, argues bitcoin represents a monumental leap in personal freedom given the inequalities and distortions built into the current financial system. If it is an instrument of freedom, what will that freedom look like?

Some companies like 80Eight are using crypto not as a speculative investment but as a way to expand business opportunities. Founder and CEO Faadil Moti explains how it's done.

Carel de Jager, research group leader at the CSIR and CEO of SilverSixpence, says the country will soon be swimming in surplus solar power after years of loadshedding. Bitcoin mining is one obvious solution to this surplus. De Jager takes us through the economics of bitcoin mining.

Hanres Beukes, CEO and founder of NeoNomad, came up with a plan to ignite mass market crypto adoption - a hybrid exchange blending the best of centralised and decentralised exchanges in a way that is simple and cheap to use. Unless people can spend crypto, adoption rates will remain low, he argues. Here's how he is tackling this market.

Christo de Wit, SA country manager for Luno, explains the challenges of shipping crypto from one address to another and how 'poisoning attacks' – with addresses similar to your own – are on the increase.

It transforms the internet from a read-write function to a platform where anyone can receive payment without a bank siphoning off a percentage, as explained by Francesco Andreoli, who leads the developer community efforts at Consensys, and Monica Singer, South Africa advisor for Consensys.

You might wonder what cellphones can possibly have to do with blockchain technology. They're called crypto or blockchain phones and they do a few things that normal smartphones do not, as Brian Maw, one of the originators of the Phēnix X blockchain phone, explains.

Mesh.trade is a new marketplace for 'tokenised' financial assets and recently raised R100 million in the form of a bond for building out schools. Could markets like these, where entrepreneurs big and small can raise capital in as little as three months, come to challenge established stock exchanges? Connie Bloem, founder and MD of Mesh.trade, takes us on a guided tour of the future of tokenised financial assets and what to expect next.

That may seem like small change for a group tallying more than R9 billion a month in sales, but what's impressive is the exponential growth in crypto as a means of payment, and what people are spending on. Carel van Wyk, founder of Money Badger, the company which enabled the crypto payment service at Pick n Pay and continues to manage it, takes us through the numbers.

Bitcoin has a low correlation to traditional assets such as equities, bonds and cash, and that correlation is weakening with time. Jason Welz, digital lead at alternative investment company Jaltech, explains how this reality is starting to stir traditional asset managers and investors into action.

Or move it to a wallet you control? Kreaan Singh, founder of crypto education platform CoinEd and project manager for distributed ledger technology at the CSIR, argues there is a time to keep your coins on the exchange, and a time to move them to self-custody.

The world financial system is undergoing radical change, and crypto is driving it. Binance's growth story over just seven years is a case study in that evolution, as its SA country manager Hannes Wessels explains.

Bitcoin and ether prices have flat-lined in recent months, but don't be fooled. We are in the year of the bitcoin halving, which has historically been associated with a surge in prices, explains Omer Iqbal, CEO of FiveWest. The real trend to watch in the coming months is the adoption of US dollar stablecoins by mid-sized companies seeking to hedge their offshore exposures.

There are more than 60 000 cryptocurrencies, most of them junk. The team at Riskbloq, headed by founder and CEO Nzwisisa Chidembo, has developed tools to filter out the noise and make sense of more than 3 000 of the more viable projects. This SA-developed toolkit is now getting the attention of serious crypto players around the world.