Nigerians have traded at $8,761,051BTC on two major Peer-to-Peer (P2P) platforms LocalBitcoins and Paxful even as the Central Bank of Nigeria continues to block financial institutions from facilitating all transactions involving bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.
At the time of this report, 1BTC was N25,300,491.36 on Paxful and $48,960.56 on coinmarketcap.
While Helsinki-based peer-to-peer bitcoin marketplace LocalBitcoins was founded in 2012, Paxful, another global cryptocurrency trading platform that accepts 300+ payment methods was founded in 2015.
Trading on the two platforms spiked after CBN on February 5, 2021, handed down a warning to financial institutions to stop facilitating crypto-related transactions.
How Effective Is The Restriction By CBN?
The latest data from UsefulTulips.org has shown that Nigeria’s apex bank is still operating in the 60s.
Instead of CBN to tap into the opportunities in blockchain, it rather went after bank account that had crypto-trading linked to them.
But that has not stopped millions of Nigerians who are enthusiastic about trading digital coins, at least going by the latest data which reveals that Nigeria is the leader of cryptocurrency trading in sub-Saharan Africa.
The report also stated that Sub-Saharan is the leader in Peer-to-Peer Bitcoin trading, making the region the largest P2P market in the world, surpassing that of North America.
Moving in the blockchain direction
Although, when it was revealed months ago that Nigerians were unperturbed by anti-crypto policy of the CBN, the apex bank came out to say it never banned the trading of cryptocurrencies.
And subsequently announced its intentions to adopt Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDC), planning its eNaira by October 2021. CBDC is the latest best practice in the adoption of digital coins.
Who is losing?
Transaction fees charged by the financial institutions when crypto traders were funding their crypto wallet are gone.
Nigerians in their millions migrated to P2P. And the UsefulTulips’ analyses data from LocalBitcoins and Paxful trading platforms show that in the last trading week alone, a total of $17,599,679 was traded in BTC volume from sub-Saharan Africa while the North American region traded $17,540,134.
Nigeria is No. 1 in sub-Saharan with $8,761,051BTC followed by Kenya with $3,613,004 BTC while Ghana came in the third position with $2,882,710 in traded BTC volume for the period.
In North American, United States tops the list with $16,752,803 in BTC volume for the period.
In April 2021, Paxful hinted that trading volume from Nigeria alone hit $1.5bn with 1.5 million users.
What does this mean for CBN?
The management of Nigeria’s apex bank has to wake up from its slumber by conveying meetings of blockchain experts in Nigeria (we have many of such within Nigeria alone) to help draw a digital currency masterplan.
We hope that the CBN’s eNaira will not be done in a way to favour the same set of recycled elites who bastardised the value of Naira because of their selfish interest.