Not all treasure chests glint in the sun. Some flicker on a laptop screen in the middle of a township room lit only by a single desk lamp. You won’t find these riches buried under rock or in vaults, they live in digital ecosystems, hidden inside code, in the silent economies of online games and crypto exchanges. Across South Africa, a new type of hustler has quietly emerged, coders, hackers, and self-taught tech tinkerers finding ways to extract real-world value from virtual treasure.
It starts in places like Soweto, Cape Town’s southern suburbs, and parts of KwaZulu-Natal where formal tech hubs may be scarce, but curiosity isn’t. While many imagine hackers as hoodie-clad figures in darkened rooms, the local reality is often more grounded. It’s a university student balancing studies with freelance work in cybersecurity. It’s a teenager learning Python via a second-hand smartphone and free YouTube tutorials.
Some call it grey-hat hacking, technically legal, morally flexible. A growing number of South African coders have discovered income streams hidden in the world of in-game economies, think rare skins in multiplayer games, NFT gaming assets, casino software plugins, and automated betting scripts. While the mainstream headlines focus on Bitcoin fraud or high-profile cybercrimes, there’s a quieter, less flashy hustle that’s much more widespread.
Take Thabiso, for example, a 26-year-old from Umlazi who asked not to use his real name. He doesn’t consider himself a hacker, more like a digital middleman. His gig? Trading rare items from online games like Counter-Strike, Global Offensive and selling them to European buyers via crypto wallets. “You can flip a skin worth R2,000 for double that if you know where to sell it,” he explains. “And most people have no clue it even exists.”
Then there’s the rise of NFT gaming assets. While much of the global NFT craze fizzled out after 2023, South Africa’s underground digital economy kept moving. For coders with the skill to design or scrape limited-edition NFTs linked to games, there’s money to be made. The risk is always part of the thrill. As Kabelo, a Johannesburg-based blockchain developer, puts it, “It’s not big money like mining gold. It’s quiet money. But it’s there if you know how to move.”
Even the online casino world feeds into this. South Africa’s regulated gaming space includes Electronic Bingo Terminals (EBTs), but what many don’t see are the coders working behind the scenes creating unofficial plugins and betting scripts. These small pieces of code aren’t designed to break the system, most of the time. Instead, they automate low-risk betting strategies or help players manage odds across multiple platforms.
To the untrained eye, it all looks like someone glued to a laptop or scrolling endlessly on a phone. But behind that glass is a network of mini-entrepreneurs stitching together informal digital economies. These aren’t giant operations. Most of the time, it’s one person, a laptop, a stack of prepaid data bundles, and sheer determination.
What makes this trend so distinctively South African is how it mixes resilience with creativity. Unlike in Silicon Valley or Tokyo, there isn’t always reliable fibre or access to state-of-the-art equipment. Data is expensive. Power outages still happen. Yet the grind doesn’t stop. In WhatsApp groups and Telegram channels, coders share scripts, troubleshoot bugs, and swap cryptocurrency tips, all in between regular day jobs or study sessions.
There’s a cultural shift at play, gold has long been South Africa’s defining resource, physical gold that shaped industries and cities. Now, there’s a new kind of gold, one mined from code instead of rock. It’s invisible but just as valuable to those chasing it.
Ironically, some of these coders cut their teeth on old-school gaming machines. There’s a story circulating in Durban tech circles about a group of friends who started out trying to decode the patterns on Electronic Bingo Terminals in local casinos. They never cracked the jackpot algorithm, but in the process, they learned enough about machine logic and probability theory to build betting apps that now sell on obscure Android markets.
Of course, this isn’t a world without risks. Operating in the grey zone means walking a fine line between innovation and illegality. Those involved are careful to clarify, no data theft, no account hacking, nothing that crosses into outright crime. “You have to keep it clean,” says Kabelo. “Once you start doing shady stuff, you don’t just risk jail. You risk losing everything you built.”
There’s also a generational angle here. In a country where youth unemployment remains painfully high, this quiet coding subculture offers an alternative path, one not tied to formal qualifications or rigid structures. It rewards self-teaching, hustle, and adaptability. And in communities where traditional resources are limited, that can make all the difference.
Government regulators and law enforcement are aware of the trend, but most efforts focus on larger cybercrime networks or financial fraud. The informal coder-hustler ecosystem flies under the radar, too decentralised and small-scale to trigger major alarms. And for the participants, that’s exactly how they like it.
“We’re not out here trying to become millionaires,” says Thabiso. “We just want to eat, pay for school, keep the lights on.”
For outsiders looking in, it might be easy to dismiss this world as a niche or a novelty. But dig a little deeper and you’ll see echoes of something older, miners digging for gold, traders navigating backroom deals, entrepreneurs building businesses from whatever tools they have at hand. The tools have changed, sure. But the human instinct to find value where others don’t remains.
So next time you walk past someone in a taxi rank hunched over a phone, or spot a teenager in a library corner with a laptop balanced on their knees, consider this, they might not just be scrolling TikTok. They could be mining digital gold. Quietly. Relentlessly. On their own terms.
