Luno serves 16 million customers spread across Africa and the Asia-Pacific region.
The CEO, James Lanigan, pointed to two main reasons. One factor is that the values of major cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana have dropped this year, further roiling retail trading activity.
Additionally, Luno invested heavily in automation technologies and overall operational enhancements in the past twelve months. Lanigan said that these investments "are rapidly changing the resource model required to run the business effectively." This means the company needs a leaner and adapted structure.
This pivot reflects a broader trend in the cryptocurrency industry, where exchanges are moving away from speculative retail trading and toward providing infrastructure for institutions and payment solutions. Luno's focus on local stablecoins also addresses a key pain point in emerging economies: expensive and slow cross-border payments. By issuing a rand-backed token, Luno aims to facilitate cheaper transfers within South Africa and to other countries, leveraging its existing user base of 16 million.
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Luno also laid out where it is putting its money going forward.
The big push is business-to-business services. Through the reorganization, Luno aims to broaden its institutional investor services, strengthen its infrastructure and compliance, and increase investment in retail offerings. The company intends to allow banks, fintechs, and telecom operators to provide cryptocurrency services under their own branding, with Luno supplying the liquidity, wallet infrastructure, and compliance support. Already, Discovery Bank - part of the Discovery Ltd. group - has signed on as an institutional partner. Lanigan said: "We will be announcing more and new partners for this offering throughout the year."
Furthermore, Luno aims to strengthen its role in offering stablecoins tied to currencies other than the US dollar across developing economies. The idea is to let people move money across borders faster and cheaper using digital-asset rails, without the price swings of volatile tokens.
Should the South African initiative succeed, Luno intends to roll out similar models in other emerging nations that lack robust local-currency stablecoin systems. Additionally, Luno will leverage its institutional settlement operations to lower the expense and difficulty of cross-border money transfers.
Luno, founded in 2013 and headquartered in London, is one of the longest-running crypto exchanges focused on emerging markets. Its 16 million users are concentrated in countries such as South Africa, Nigeria, and Indonesia, where volatile local currencies and limited banking infrastructure make digital assets attractive for savings and transfers. The company has raised more than $20 million from investors including Barry Silbert's Digital Currency Group and Naspers.
The layoffs, while painful, follow a pattern seen across the crypto sector in 2023 and 2024, as firms like Coinbase, Binance, and Kraken have also shed staff to cut costs. Luno's new emphasis on institutional services and stablecoins positions it to compete with larger rivals that already dominate the B2B space, such as Circle and Fireblocks, while differentiating itself through regionally pegged tokens that address real-world friction in cross-border payments.
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