Affected customers must sell every position by 31 August or watch a $2 monthly inactivity fee compound into $52 by December. Luno still has not publicly named which regions it is leaving.
Luno has cut off outgoing crypto transfers for an undisclosed group of customers and given them until 31 August to sell every position they hold. The exchange will close their accounts on 1 September and charge them monthly fees on whatever fiat they leave behind.
The Cape Town-based platform published the guidance on its own help site rather than by press release, and it has still not named the regions involved. Selling and normal bank withdrawals stop after 31 August. Wallet access ends when the accounts close a day later. Anyone who did not verify a bank account before deposits were disabled — that happened on 1 June — has to contact support and provide a bank statement issued in the previous three months. Manual withdrawals then take three to five business days once support signs them off.
The wind-down is unusual in one important respect. Most exchanges that exit a jurisdiction allow customers to move their crypto in kind to another wallet before the doors close. Luno permitted that until 29 June, then shut the transfer function entirely. Anyone in the affected cohort who did not take their coins off the exchange by then now has no route to preserve their holdings: they must convert to fiat and withdraw the cash to a bank Luno already knows about, or accept the fee schedule and hope a manual withdrawal clears later.
That fee schedule matters. Balances above the equivalent of $10 remain eligible for manual withdrawal after 1 September, but Luno will start charging a $2 monthly inactivity fee immediately. From December, an additional $50 dormancy charge stacks on top, for a combined $52 a month against dormant balances. Anything below $10 is retained outright: Luno cites its minimum withdrawal thresholds and says those smaller balances will not enter the manual-withdrawal queue at all.
The company's public explanation is that it wants to focus on its core markets in Africa and South East Asia. Its published availability page names Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa in Africa, plus Indonesia and Malaysia in South East Asia. Luno also maintains a separate list of 33 unsupported jurisdictions but has not tied the September closures to that list, to a security incident, to a regulator, or to any specific financial pressure. Affected users have been left to work out from their own account notices whether the timetable applies to them.
Context makes the silence harder to parse. Luno confirmed on 28 July that it will cut about 20 per cent of its global workforce, redirecting resources toward institutional and business-to-business services. Chief executive James Lanigan did not disclose which regions or how many roles were affected. The company has not publicly linked the layoffs to the account closures, and there is no reason to assume they are the same action. Both, however, move parts of the retail footprint away from Luno's earlier global posture, and both were communicated in ways that made it hard for outside observers to size the change. That pivot lines up with a wider shift across crypto brokers: institutional desks are writing more of the volume and doing so in fewer tokens, while retail customers who were not told they were about to become non-strategic pay the cost.
The precedent for this kind of exit is Luno's 2023 wind-down in Singapore, where the exchange gave customers a named service-ending date and told them to remove both crypto and local-currency balances before it. This time is different. There is no named jurisdiction, no explanation of why in-kind crypto transfers were cut off before fiat sales, and no timeline for whether the affected cohort will grow. Regulators in the UK, EU and elsewhere have tightened custody and travel-rule requirements throughout 2026, and the pattern of exchange exits is now familiar: Binance withdrew its Greek MiCA application in June while Coinbase and OKX bid for its EU users. Any exchange choosing to leave a market it no longer wants to serve is entitled to do so; the ordinary practice is to say which market and why.
Luno was acquired by Digital Currency Group in 2020 and has spent the intervening years building a retail presence in more than 40 countries. A customer who missed the 29 June transfer window because they did not read the account notice in time now has a choice between converting to fiat at whatever spread Luno quotes on the day and watching $52 a month erode whatever they leave behind.
The next firm dates are 31 August for ordinary sales and bank withdrawals, 1 September for account closure, and December for the additional $50 dormancy fee. Customers who cannot verify a bank account through the standard flow have to contact Luno before the ordinary withdrawal route closes; nobody outside the company knows how many are in that position, and the exchange has offered no public number.
