Never give up {{ FIRSTNAME | there }}? A group of rodent-studying scientists put their subjects (marmots) on OnlyFans when their funding dried up. As far as we can tell, they're making actual money, too. 🐿️

Send this to a friend who'd subscribe to a marmot.

In This Open Letter

Every day, thousands of transactions happen on SA's P2P marketplaces, but scams and even physical violence are a huge problem, so this founder built the honesty fix…

In June, police secured a 15-year sentence for a serial Facebook Marketplace scammer who faked bank notifications and drove off with 26 sellers' cars across 3 provinces.

Now SAPS and the National Consumer Commission have officially flagged it as a high-risk zone for syndicate operations, with global estimates that as much as 17% of Facebook respondents (1 in 6) might have been defrauded, and naming the suburbs where buyers get robbed.

It happened to a local founder: Benji Smith had sketched a few rough workflows for a solution, meaning to build it at some point when, last year, he was hijacked at gunpoint while arranging a sale through one of the common P2P platforms. It spurred him to use AI to fast-track a build that makes trading safer for both sides…

The marketplace that won't pay until everyone's happy

VaKoop is a South African marketplace for preloved items that doesn’t pay the seller until the buyer confirms delivery. There are no cash meet-ups and no dodgy bank slips, because The Courier Guy delivers every item door-to-door.

It even has an AI sales assistant called Genio: Snap a pic of four pairs of shoes, and it separates each pair, identifies the brand and model, prices them and writes the listings in under a minute. Which gave Benji an additional opportunity for servicing bulk traders…

Ideal for bulk trading

A big slice of SA's estimated R10 billion second-hand clothing market runs through traders working off tarps in places like Joburg's Dunusa market. Genio's bulk mode and VaKoop's Seller Pro tier let them turn bales or crates of mixed stock into hundreds of priced, described listings in minutes, then handle payment and courier arrangements.

Which is smart, 'cos our first concern would be how you build network effect with something like this (Facebook is Facebook, after all). But VaKoop's bet is to stack supply first, then switch on demand once the shelves fill. And the bulk traders could be a great start to that.

We're watching this space…

How many times have you seen retailers asking shopping customers to download an app, visit a URL or fill out a form on a browser that takes 30 seconds to load?

Half of them don't finish. Most of them never come back.

It's the same online: Competition entries that require five fields and a CAPTCHA, sign-up pages that open in a separate browser tab on mobile, loyalty opt-ins buried three screens deep.

The friction between when a customer shows interest and your business actually getting their details is a leak in the funnel. And for most SA businesses, those leaks are invisible, because you never see the leads you didn't capture.

There's a better way. And the brands that have found it are pulling ahead fast.

⚖️ FSCA Fines Hit R2.9bn, One Deepfake Ate Most of It. The FSCA imposed over R2.89bn in penalties in the year to March, up from R119.8m. Trading platform Banxso alone accounted for R2bn+ after a deepfake ad scandal that cost ~7'000 investors close to R1bn. The scarier number: 68% of South Africans have been targeted by online scams.

🔬 Wits Just Made Light Weatherproof. Wits physicists have shown quantum information carried on twisted light survives severe turbulence completely intact, even when the light arrives mangled. It reopens a two-decade-stuck route to secure comms, and it needs no new hardware. SA's world-class at this. Now someone just needs to fund the commercialisation.

📱 Reddit Builds a Video Feed. With Google referrals turning "choppy", Reddit is building its own video experience: watch or just listen to top threads. It's copying the TikTok format that turned Reddit threads into 19.6 million posts on someone else's app. Owning the format you accidentally invented is harder than it looks.

💸 Your Emigrating Spouse Now Comes With a Tax Bill. Treasury's 2026 draft tax bills would close the spousal donations loophole, and it's backdated to 25 February. Founders should watch the quieter SEZ line: that 15% rate now carries transfer pricing documentation. Comments close 28 August.

📊 Smarter Decisions in 2026. Finance is the biggest reason SA SMEs fail. Finvoke gives startups and small businesses CFO-level insight, without paying a full-time salary, so you can grow with clarity, not guesswork.*

* From our partners. Find all the best service providers for your business in our Founder Stack.

Two SA businesses with identical profit can be worth wildly different amounts, because value is set by the things around the profit that lift or sink it. We got an SA valuation expert to show us how to know what creates the value in your business.

And it turns out, there are 4 specific steps to find your value drivers and grow your number deliberately instead of by accident.

☝ Send this to a founder who thinks their valuation is just profit times a multiple.

Bitcoin closed July up, but traders are bracing for August. BTC gained about 8.9% in July yet slid below $63'000 at month-end after a hawkish US Fed hold pushed Treasury yields to three-month highs. The $60'000 put is now the most popular hedge on Deribit, with seasonality pointing to a typically negative August.

A hardware wallet bug let an attacker steal $38m in 25 minutes. An attacker swept roughly 594 BTC from around 500 Coldcard wallets in under 30 minutes on 31 July, exploiting a firmware flaw introduced in March 2021 that made devices skip their hardware randomness and fall back to predictable software keys.

On-chain contracted, but tokenised stocks exploded. Binance Research's half-year review shows total DeFi TVL fell 38% in H1 while the six major Layer 1s shed $246.5bn. But tokenised RWAs went the other way, up more than 50% to ~$34bn. Case in point: bStocks crossed $500m in AUM seven weeks after launch, up from $5.6m on day one, with Gen Z making up 44% of trading and 41.5% of users starting their TradFi journey there.

Disclaimer: Digital asset prices can be volatile. The value of your investment may go down or up and you may not get back the amount invested. You are solely responsible for your investment decisions and Binance is not liable for any losses you may incur. Not financial advice. For more information, see our Terms of Use and Risk Warning.

Last week, we showed you CivicLens political info platform, asking whether you're voting in SA's local government elections on 4 November. The verdict? Overwhelmingly yebo…

⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🤷 Nah, what's the point? (2%)

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🤔 I'm undecided on voting and for which party? (11%)

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 👍 Yebo, and posting a thumbfie afterwards (87%)

Your 2 cents…

Hmm… a whole debate on its own, Alan, but 87% of this crowd is already halfway there. 🗳️

Faith in the Workplace, 4 Aug, Pretoria: Ashburton founding CEO Boshoff Grobler and Ogilvy SA's Ipi Thibedi on leading with conviction at the top. Get tickets.

FinMaster Friday, 7 Aug, Stellenbosch: A social game night where you buy spaza shops, survive load shedding and learn about money without the lecture. Get tickets.

Work Rewired: Hiring in the AI Economy, 13 Aug, CPT: How AI is changing what talent looks like, how hiring works and which skills actually matter now. Get tickets.

Powered by Radi. Want your business event in front of 36,000 The Open Letter readers? Host it on Radi, and it lands here.

🧩 Tool to Try: Esenca Sizing does 3D measurement for workwear, including hand and foot sizing.

🇬🇧 That's Interesting: The Union Jack isn't the UK's flag. It doesn’t actually have an official national flag. Using it at public events just became a habit; there’s no law saying it must be flown.

🌏 Next Level: Dashcam footage of the moment the earthquake hit Japan last week.

🔭 Wow Site: Dark Hours shows you exactly what's visible in the sky above your location tonight.