How to buy Shiba Inu (SHIB) in South Africa

In this step-by-step guide, learn how to buy Shiba Inu (SHIB) tokens in South Africa. This method is what I personally use to get crypto that isn’t available on any local platforms.

Note: This is not financial advise to buy SHIB tokens, please do your own research whenever investing in anything. Don’t invest money you can’t afford to lose.

Getting started

Update 13 April 2022: Shiba Inu tokens are now available on VALR and can be bought directly on this platform. To get started with crypto currency checkout out my guide here: How To Buy Crypto Currency In South Africa

Firstly, you will need two wallets (apps) to buy and send crypto and then swap it for Shiba Inu tokens. The reason we have to do this, is banks do not allow direct deposits/online purchases for overseas crypto wallets. View our beginner guide to buying crypto.

You will need the following accounts:

VALR Wallet (South African wallet)
Binance Wallet (Overseas wallet)

Please register for both accounts and complete the registration entirely by verifying your accounts with the required documents. It’s usually copy of ID/Passport and may take a few days to get verified. This is required to transact with crypto.

How to buy Shiba Inu

So once the above accounts are verified, or if you already have a local South African crypto wallet you may follow the similar steps outlined below.

TL;DR click here.

You will need to have enough Rands to buy around 20 XRP tokens, and also have a little extra for fees for buying and sending. I’d recommend having around 23 XRP as the minimum.

Login to your VALR wallet, you will want to deposit into your ZAR wallet if you haven’t already.
1. To deposit into your ZAR wallet, select Wallets then find ZAR and select this wallet. (If you don’t see this make sure you don’t have the “Hide zero balances” selected.
2. Once the ZAR wallet is open, select deposit and follow the prompts. You will most likely need to EFT from your bank with the specific reference number.
3. Once you have completed your EFT, you will need to wait for this to reflect in your VALR account. It may take a day or two to reflect.
Search for XRP and select this wallet. Choose the Buy option.
Once you are in the Buy/Sell menu, you may choose how much ZAR you want to buy or select Use all to buy the maximum amount of ZAR in your wallet. This will convert your ZAR to XRP (Another crypto token we are going to use to convert to Shiba Inu in the later steps).
Minimize your VALR app on your phone and navigate to Binance. We want to send our XRP in the previous step to our Binance wallet.
In Binance, select the Wallets option. Once open, select the Spot option. (Be aware of the Hide 0 balances option – and make sure it’s unchecked).
Search for XRP, as we want to receive XRP we bought from VALR.
Once you’ve opened the XRP spot wallet in Binance, select Deposit and choose the Ripple Network.
Now you should see a QR code with some details like Network, XRP Deposit Address and XRP Tag. You will need to copy XRP Deposit Address and XRP Tag. To do this copy one at a time, minimize Binance and go back to VALR and paste the XRP Deposit Address into the relevant XRP Address and do the same for the XRP Tag into the Tag value. (Toggle between Binance and VALR, or copy the Binance values somewhere you can refer to)
Enter the amount of XRP you want to send, I normally select Withdraw all in these cases, but if you want to leave some XRP in your VALR wallet you can do so.
Select the Review Withdrawal and complete the process. It should take around 5-10 minutes to reflect in your Binance wallet.
Navigate back to your Binance wallet and on the home screen select the More option, then find the Trade category.
Choose Convert and wait a bit for the data to load. Select XRP in the from and search for Shib in the to address, you may enter the maximum amount or even the minimum amount (at this time of writing it’s 20 XRP).
Preview the conversion, and complete the steps. Congrats you now own SHIBA INU tokens!

Summary / Notes

This guide will show you how to purchase Shiba Inu tokens in South Africa. We use XRP as it’s fees are a lot less and quicker to reflect than using something like Ethereum, and it’s a bit more straight forward as the current price is around R10-R12 per coin (at the time of this writing).

The gist of the above outline is buy XRP in a local wallet, like VALR, send it to a wallet that allows Shiba Inu, Binance, and convert the XRP to Shiba Inu.

This method can be used to convert to other coins such as BNB, CAKE, BUSD, USDT, AVAX and much more – it really depends on what your wallet supports and this is one of the reasons why I chose Binance.

If you have another method you use to buy alt coins, that’s easier please share your comments below!

Photo by Petr Magera on Unsplash