The rand premium, worked out in the open.

Bitcoin costs R 1 239 658 in rand on our feed. Its dollar price, converted at the rate implied by USDT, comes to R 1 239 372. The difference between those two numbers is the premium.

Every row is currently within 0.06% of zero. The rand and dollar prices on our feed are moving at a single conversion rate right now, so today the index reads as an arithmetic check rather than a venue-to-venue spread — a real gap would appear here the moment rand prices move on their own.

The rate itself carries a premium

Two different dollar-to-rand numbers sit on this site. The rate implied by USDT is R 16.3260. Our published fiat rate feed puts the dollar at R 16.2687. That is a gap of +0.35% — the rand price of a dollar-pegged stablecoin against the published rand price of a dollar. Because the index above converts with the stablecoin rate, that gap is folded into the conversion and cannot show up in any single asset's row.

How the number is built

One line of arithmetic, run per asset against the same market feed the rest of the site uses.

• 01Both prices in that line come from the same 80eight market feed, read at the same moment, so nothing here compares a fresh price against a stale one.
• 02The USD/ZAR in the formula is implied, not observed. No public interbank USD/ZAR feed is exposed to this site, so the rate is derived from a dollar-pegged stablecoin: its rand price divided by its dollar price, using USDT where available and USDC as the fallback. It is a stablecoin-implied rate, and calling it an interbank mid would be wrong.
• 03That choice has a cost, and it is worth stating plainly. The stablecoin doing the converting measures zero premium against itself by construction, and whatever premium or discount sits in its own rand price is folded into the rate — so it shifts every other row together rather than showing up as one asset's outlier.
• 04Assets without a published dollar price are left out rather than estimated, so the index covers fewer assets than the rates board does.
• 05What this is not: there is no offshore venue and no history in the calculation. It is our rand price against our dollar price at a point in time — not a global volume-weighted mid, and not a 30-day average.
• 06The same figures, with the methodology attached, are served as JSON at /zar-premium/data.json, refreshed on the same one-minute cycle as this page.