TL;DR Breakdown
- Crypto adoption rises in Nigeria after crypto ban.
- Sub-saharan Africa now number one region with highest P2Ptrade volume.
- #EndSars anti government protest led to crypto ban.
The Crypto adoption rate in Nigeria has continued to rise astronomically 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, the CBN’s ban on cryptocurrencies majorly involved restricting banks from providing support for cryptocurrencies and crypto firms. These restrictions led to two significant effects in Nigeria.
One was more popularity and fame 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 in the rise in crypto adoption in the country.
Data from Google Trends reveals that Nigeria remains the number one country in online searches for ‘Bitcoin’ followed by Australia.
P2P, as mentioned earlier, has also enormously 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 number one in P2P trading volume with a weekly transaction of $18.8 million. North America posts a weekly P2P transaction of $18 million.
Crypto adoption surge and causes 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 negative things 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 likely 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.
Crypto was one of the major sources of funds for the #EndSars protest. The government crackdown on the cryptocurrency market is then seen as a simple case of the people in power trying their possible best to beat down its growth in the densely populated nation.
Land a High-Paying Web3 Job in 90 Days: The Ultimate Roadmap
