Bybit in Zimbabwe: two regulators, opposite answers

Updated 2026-09-19

Zimbabwe changed position on crypto in June 2026, and almost nothing written in English has caught up. The country now has a registration regime for crypto businesses. It also has a central bank circular from 2018 telling banks to have nothing to do with crypto exchanges, which nobody has ever withdrawn, and two regulators currently pointing in opposite directions. Working out where an offshore exchange sits in that requires reading all of it.

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What Bybit blocks here

Zimbabwe appears in the General Fiat Service section of Bybit's restricted issuing countries page, which covers fiat deposit, fiat withdrawal and One-Click Buy. That page was last revised on 18 September 2026. Zimbabwe is not on the separate list that closes the platform outright, so an account is not the problem; funding it through Zimbabwean rails is.

The restriction is written against the issuing country of the card or account. A Zimbabwean-issued instrument will not work from Harare or from anywhere else, and a trip does not fix it. What Bybit does publish about its peer-to-peer desk is covered in the P2P guide.

Zimbabwe started registering crypto firms in June 2026

Statutory Instrument 99 of 2026, the Money Laundering and Proceeds of Crime (Virtual Asset Service Providers Registration) Regulations, was gazetted on 10 June 2026 under the Money Laundering and Proceeds of Crime Act. It makes the Financial Intelligence Unit, which sits inside the Reserve Bank, the registrar for virtual asset service providers.

The detail is specific enough to be checkable. There is no application fee; registration costs 500 United States dollars to issue and 400 to renew. Registration runs for a year and renewal must be applied for within ninety days before expiry. Customer due diligence bites from 1,000 dollars, records are kept five years, and the FATF travel rule applies to originator and beneficiary information.

Two things follow that most coverage misses. First, this is registration with an anti-money-laundering unit, not a prudential licence: it says who may operate, not that anyone is supervised for solvency. Second, and more importantly for a reader of this page, the obligations land on service providers. SI 99 says nothing about individuals holding or trading.

Why an offshore exchange cannot register

Section 4(3) is the provision that decides Bybit's position. An applicant must be incorporated or registered as a legal entity in Zimbabwe, and where the applicant is part of a multinational group, it must operate through a subsidiary incorporated or registered in Zimbabwe.

There is no route in that text for a foreign platform serving Zimbabweans from abroad. So Zimbabwe has built a registration regime that an offshore exchange is structurally outside of — not refused, not banned, simply ineligible on the face of the instrument. That is a different situation from Botswana, where the statute claims authority over platforms operating into the country and invites them in.

Two regulators, opposite postures

This is the part that genuinely has no equivalent elsewhere in the region.

The Reserve Bank runs a fintech regulatory sandbox under guidelines issued in February 2021 and effective from 1 March 2021. Its list of activities that are not eligible names, in terms, cryptocurrency, digital currency and central bank digital currency. Crypto is excluded by name from the central bank's own innovation channel, and that exclusion still stands.

The securities regulator went the other way. SECZim issued sandbox guidelines in September 2024, effective 1 November 2024, and on 24 July 2026 published its first approved cohort: seven firms, of which five are blockchain or tokenisation platforms, covering asset tokenisation, securities tokenisation, infrastructure tokenisation and blockchain-driven capital raising. One Zimbabwean regulator names crypto as ineligible; another admits tokenisation firms to test. Both positions are live at the same time.

The circular nobody has withdrawn

In May 2018 the Reserve Bank issued Circular to Banking Institutions No. 2/2018 on virtual currencies. It directed banks not to use, trade, hold or transact in virtual currencies, not to provide banking services facilitating anyone dealing in them, and to exit relationships with virtual currency exchanges within sixty days.

We could find no instrument withdrawing, repealing or superseding it, and it remains listed on the Reserve Bank's own live circulars index. A Zimbabwean law firm analysing SI 99 flagged the same unresolved question in June 2026. So the registration regime and the banking prohibition coexist, and nobody has reconciled them in writing.

One correction while we are here. A Harare High Court provisional order in May 2018 suspended the directive as against one local exchange, granted after the Reserve Bank did not appear. Several crypto outlets describe this as the ban being overturned. It was a provisional order in one party's favour by default, and we could not obtain a case number or a reported judgment, so treat the stronger claims with suspicion.

Exchange control is the real exposure

If there is a risk worth taking seriously in Zimbabwe, this is it, and it is not the one people write about.

Alongside the 2018 circular the Governor published a press statement warning that cryptocurrencies can facilitate externalisation of funds, that any platform producing a flow of foreign exchange or value into and out of Zimbabwe is subject to approval under the Exchange Control Act, and that crypto enables exchange control circumvention because the transfer is not effected and reported by an authorised dealer. It also states that dealers and investors in cryptocurrency in Zimbabwe are not protected by law.

The Act behind that warning has real teeth. For specified currency and asset offences it provides imprisonment of up to ten years together with a fine of up to three times the value of the property involved, and on conviction the court must declare the property forfeit to the state. The general penalty provision sets no statutory ceiling at all. Under the Reserve Bank's current guidelines to authorised dealers, an individual may withdraw 1,000 dollars a day in cash from a foreign currency account and carry 2,000 dollars out of the country, while capital account transactions by individuals require prior Reserve Bank approval case by case, with no published retail allowance.

That last point is the one to sit with. There is no documented Zimbabwean prosecution of anyone for buying cryptocurrency that we could identify in publicly indexed sources, and the courts database blocks automated search, so treat that as unverified rather than as a clean record. But the framework that would be used is on the books and the central bank has already said in writing how it sees the activity.

What every transfer costs

Zimbabwe taxes transfers themselves, which changes the arithmetic of any round trip. The intermediated money transfer tax is 1.5% on local currency, cut from 2% with effect from 1 January 2026 by Finance Act No. 7 of 2025, and 2% on United States dollar transactions. Above the equivalent of 500,000 dollars a single transaction carries a flat charge instead.

EcoCash's own published tariff, updated in May 2026, corroborates both rates and adds the provider layer: a 1.70% service fee on dollar cash-out, and send charges of 1.30% on dollar amounts above five dollars. Two details on that page are worth more than they look. Its dollar bands stop at 500, and its local currency cash-out is shown as not available at all — the country's dominant wallet does not cash out the new currency. Funding and exiting twice means paying the transfer tax twice, before any spread.

The currency itself is young. ZiG was created by Statutory Instrument 60 of 2024, gazetted on 5 April 2024, converting old balances at 2,498.7242 to one with notes entering circulation on 30 April 2024. The Reserve Bank's mid-rate on 18 September 2026 was 26.6478 to the dollar. In its August 2026 mid-term statement the bank reported single-digit ZiG inflation, a policy rate cut from 35% to 30%, and reserves of 1.7 billion dollars covering 1.7 months of imports. It also reported that electronic ZiG transactions passed 40% of national payment system volume for the first time in mid-2026, which means something close to sixty per cent of electronic transactions are still being done in dollars.

Tax, and what ZIMRA has not said

Capital gains tax on specified assets acquired from February 2009 runs at 20% of the gain, with 10% on unlisted marketable securities. The dollar income tax tables run from a 1,200 dollar annual tax-free threshold to a top marginal rate of 40%, with a 3% AIDS levy on tax payable.

Two honest gaps. As at 19 September 2026 the revenue authority had not published 2026 tax tables at all, so the 2025 tables are the most recent primary figures, and any site quoting confident 2026 bands is quoting an aggregator. And we found no ZIMRA guidance mentioning cryptocurrency, virtual assets or digital assets. A 2026 voluntary disclosure notice was reported in the press as aimed at crypto traders, but that framing is the journalist's, not the revenue authority's.

KYC: the chitupa, and a licence that works in one place but not the other

Zimbabweans verify on the national registration card, the chitupa, or a passport. Bybit accepts passport, identity card, residence permit and driving licence, and states that it does not accept e-copies or scanned images; no African country is named anywhere in its KYC FAQ.

There is a neat asymmetry here. EcoCash's terms state that a driver's licence shall not be accepted as identification, while Bybit accepts one. The document that fails on the country's dominant payment rail passes on the exchange. Verification comes before trading, and the steps are in our KYC guide.

Zimbabwe is the region's most legally complicated market and the one where the gap between what is written and what is enforced is widest. Check the country table on the availability page, read the withdrawal guide before committing anything, and compare with Botswana, which licenses providers and claims reach over offshore ones, and Zambia, where the central bank went after the banking rails instead.

Frequently asked questions

Is crypto illegal in Zimbabwe?
No, and saying so is now clearly wrong. Statutory Instrument 99 of 2026, gazetted on 10 June 2026, created a registration regime for virtual asset service providers run by the Financial Intelligence Unit. The obligations in it bind service providers, not individuals holding or trading. What has not changed is that moving value across the border still engages the Exchange Control Act, and the 2018 circular telling banks to drop crypto exchanges has never been withdrawn.
Can Bybit register under the new Zimbabwean rules?
Not as it stands. Section 4(3) of SI 99 of 2026 requires an applicant to be incorporated or registered in Zimbabwe, and says that a multinational group must operate through a subsidiary incorporated or registered there. An offshore exchange without a Zimbabwean subsidiary cannot satisfy that, so Zimbabwe now has a registration regime that Bybit is structurally outside of.
Can I fund Bybit with a Zimbabwean card or bank account?
No. Zimbabwe is named in the General Fiat Service section of Bybit's restricted issuing countries page, which covers fiat deposit, fiat withdrawal and One-Click Buy. The restriction attaches to the country that issued the instrument rather than to where you are sitting, so a Zimbabwean-issued card fails from anywhere.
What does a transfer actually cost in Zimbabwe?
More than most people budget for, because the transfer tax applies on top of the provider's fee. The intermediated money transfer tax is 1.5% on local currency, reduced from 2% with effect from 1 January 2026 by Finance Act No. 7 of 2025, and 2% on United States dollars. EcoCash's own published tariff shows both rates alongside a 1.70% service fee on dollar cash-out, so a single cash-out can carry close to 4% before any exchange spread.

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