Don't get me wrong, I wasn't suggesting that Luno was doing anything untoward. I have absolute trust in Luno, and have had absolute comfort in moving millions of rands through my Luno account (it was all the same money over and over again going in circles). All I was saying is that I was thinking that Luno was bringing in additional BTC liquidity (because the arbitrage seems to be consistently low) and selling it on the exchange, not using customer funds. Surely there is nothing wrong with the exchange adding liquidity? I would, at times, love it if Luno did that and there was less of a price difference because then I can move money offshore cheaper.
If that's not the case, it means that local BTC liquidity has gotten to the point where there is enough supply to meet demand. That, or there are still peeps running arbitrage.
I'm not 100% sure around the legalities of doing this like this, but I'm fairly certain there would need to a remittance license involved at some point. Along with bank accounts on a USD exchange which we don't have. It's quite difficult to bring in liquidity from somewhere else, that means we'd have to trade it at some point. Seems like a bit of a grey area, and not something that (at least I personally don't think so) would go down particularly well in digital currency circles.
While maybe not on the same path, remember that exchanges in China faked volumes. Equally dodgy
Our established markets see a healthy amount of liquidity. Sure, it's not on the same level as other major international exchanges, but then again, the demand isn't as high.
Our two biggest markets currently are South Africa and Malaysia:
ZA
~170 BTC worth of liquidity
906 BTC volume traded in the last 24 hours
MY
~280 BTC worth of liquidity
323 BTC volume traded in the last 24 hours
Data is available on our exchange pages
https://www.luno.com/trade/XBTZAR
https://www.luno.com/trade/XBTMYR
So long story short, each market sees its price set by supply and demand. If that volume includes high amounts of arbitrage it'll probably correct the price to what's seen on other exchanges. The fact that arbitrage trading isn't happening is mostly down to exchange controls which make it expensive, risky and slow.
If you're buying and selling Bitcoin on Luno you're following local market conditions, which means that other prices outside of the country don't matter.