Crypto adoption continues to rise in Nigeria amidst crypto ban

TL;DR Breakdown

• Crypto adoption rises in Nigeria after crypto ban
• Subsaharan Africa now number one region with highest P2Ptrade volume
• #EndSars anti government protest led to crypto ban

Crypto adoption rate in Nigeria has continued to shoot beyond the roof despite the government’s ban on cryptocurrencies.

The hunger for crypto displayed by Nigerians would require more than a ban from the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) to take crypto away from the residents.

However, CBN ban on cryptocurrencies was all about restricting banks from providing support for cryptocurrencies and crypto firms. The restrictions led to two things in Nigeria.

One was more popular for cryptocurrencies, while the other was about increased trade volume on peer-to-peer (P2P) trading in the country.

The recent price surge in Bitcoin, its second strongest week after the crash, may also have been a factor for the rise in crypto adoption in the country.

Data from Google Trends reveals that Nigeria remains number one searching for ‘Bitcoin’ followed by Australia.

P2P, as mentioned earlier, has also astronomically risen since the CBN restriction. Nigeria comes second globally in P2P trading volumes behind the US as the second-largest market globally, data from Useful Tulip reveal.

Nigeria’s surge in crypto adoption has had a magic touch on crypt ranking in sub-Saharan Africa entirely. The region is now the number one in P2P trading volume with a weekly transaction of $18.8 million. North America posts a weekly P2P transaction of $18 million.

Amidst crypto adoption surge, possible cause of crypto ban in Nigeria

Godwin Emefiele, during his interaction with a Nigerian lawmaker on the crypto ban, said that the value of crypto is derived from thin air.

The CBN governor, during that interaction, had several illicit to say about crypto. He said they are mostly used for illegal financing such as money laundering, terrorism financing, among others, because of their hard-to-trace nature.

However, Adewunmi Emoruwa, the founder of Garfield — a public policy organization that provided a grant for journalists covering an anti-government protest (#EndSARS) has a different thing to say on the Bitcoin ban.

“I think that EndSars is like the key catalyst for some of these decisions the government is making. It caused fear. They saw, for example, that people could decide to bypass government structures and institutions to mobilize, he said.

Larger Nigerians hold that owing to crypto being a source of funds for the #EndSars protest. The government is trying to work against it.