PayFast sellers can start accepting Bitcoin payments from local and international buyers. (Note that Bitcoin payments are currently in beta testing mode.)

PayFast entered into an exciting partnership with South Africa’s biggest Bitcoin exchange, BitX, which will allow buyers to make Bitcoin payments to PayFast sellers.

What makes this different from most Bitcoin platforms/transactions, is that while buyers will make a Bitcoin payment, sellers will receive South African rand in their PayFast accounts (and then, bank accounts).

There are numerous advantages to accepting and using Bitcoin:

It’s often mentioned that the Bitcoin rate of exchange is very volatile. It’s all rather logical, since it is determined by the market, which collectively “decides” what the value of it should be. This is very much the same way that the market collectively and continuously decides what the price of other resources, like platinum or gold or currencies, should be.

Herein lies the biggest problem for sellers: volatility. If a seller listed a product on their website for 1 BTC (at an exchange rate of R6900) and someone purchased that item at a later date, when the rate of exchange is lower (say R6000), they would ultimately lose out on the transaction (or have some explaining to do to their accountant).

Sure, the seller would have 1 BTC in their possession, but that single bitcoin might be worth less than what the product originally cost.

PayFast/BitX solves this by making it so that sellers don’t receive Bitcoin, so regardless of the BTC/ZAR exchange rate, they will receive the South African rand amount for their payments.

- See more at: http://paymentsafrika.com/region/southern-africa/payfast-adds-bitcoin-as-a-payment-option/#sthash.rrTY3E3M.dpuf