By Christo de Wit, Country Manager for Luno South Africa
The Nasdaq 100 has nearly tripled in value over the last three years, fuelled primarily by the Artificial Intelligence (AI) hype cycle.
Nvidia, the AI chipmaker, now makes up about 14% of the index, with Microsoft in second place at 12%, and Apple, Amazon, and Meta rounding out the rest of the top five.
Nvidia’s stock price surged an extraordinary 1,285% over the past five years.
If you had invested R10,000 in Nvidia in 2020, that would now be worth around R128,500 before fees.
And when accounting for the rand’s devaluation against the US dollar, the real figure for a South African investor would be higher still.
Remarkably, Nvidia is one of the few assets that has even outperformed Bitcoin, which climbed around 900% over the same timeframe.
By comparison, the JSE FTSE Top 40 managed a more modest but still respectable 15-20% between 2020 and 2025.
South African investors have long faced challenges in getting easy, frictionless access to these high-growth global sectors.
For decades, offshore opportunities have remained the preserve of institutional investors or wealthy individuals.
Ordinary South Africans were left out in the cold.
Investing offshore used to be fraught with obstacles: foreign exchange controls, limited brokerage access, high fees, and strict minimum investments.
Currency conversion costs would eat into returns, while settlement delays stretched from three to five days.
Buying a single Tesla share meant paying thousands of rands for an entire share, since fractional shares weren’t available.
While some South Africans gained indirect exposure to offshore markets through locally listed ETFs, direct access to high-growth companies abroad was largely out of reach.
Luno’s recent addition of more than 60 tokenised US stocks and exchange-traded funds (ETFs) has lowered the barrier to entry, giving local investors direct access to markets like the Nasdaq 100, the S&P 500, and individual US companies such as Nvidia.
Today, investors can open the Luno app, choose a stock, and tap “buy.”
Each token corresponds to a share in a real company, held in custody, with its price tracking the live value of the underlying stock.
Investors gain the same market exposure as they would with traditional shares, but with the added benefits of blockchain technology: global accessibility, after-hours trading, faster settlement, and dividends paid directly as token shares into their Luno wallet.
Total offshore asset allocations of South African institutional investors more than doubled between 2012 and 2023, according to the 2024 Financial Stability Review (FSR), published by the South African Reserve Bank, with a marked increase since early February 2022, when the National Treasury increased the offshore prudential limit for South African institutional investors to 45%.
It makes sense that institutional investors would go this route, given that the JSE comprises about 1% of global equity, a drop in an ocean of equities – and opportunity.
Tokenised stocks are borderless by design, and gives individual investors the same opportunity to gain exposure to company stocks beyond local markets.
The message here is not to abandon South African companies altogether or bet the house on a single hyper-growth offshore company.
Rather, it’s about recognising the value of having the option to diversify into current global opportunities, but also in future when the next growth cycle arrives.
Nvidia may be the face of the AI boom today, but AI won’t be the last major trend to reshape markets.
The real breakthrough lies in the flexibility tokenised stocks provide: For Luno and others that offer tokenised stocks, it’s the ability to quickly list new sectors and companies on a platform and make them instantly available to ordinary investors.
Just as Luno gave South Africans access to Bitcoin back in 2013, tokenised stocks now open the door to the next Nvidia-level opportunity, whether in quantum computing, renewable energy, or some innovation we haven’t yet imagined.
In a world where markets move faster than ever, access matters.
For South Africans, the ability to invest offshore no longer requires navigating a maze of bureaucracy, forex hurdles, and prohibitive minimums.
Offshore investing has always been out of reach for most South Africans. Tokenisation is making it available to everyone.
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