The world’s largest cryptocurrency platform by volume of transactions, Binance, has included Nigerian local banks to its Peer-to-Peer (P2P) platform in order to improve the process of carrying out Peer-to-Peer transactions.
What’s more
12 Nigerian banks made the list of commercial banks with access to Binance P2P platform amongst the 21 banks listed in Africa. The Nigerian banks include Access Bank, Ecobank, Fidelity Bank, First Bank of Nigeria, FCMB, GTBank, Keystone Bank, Stanbic Bank, Standard Chartered Bank, Sterling Bank, Zenith Bank, Union Bank of Nigeria.
What you should know
- In February 2021, the Central Bank of Nigeria directed all commercial banks in the country to stop processing cryptocurrency transactions in order to deal with the threat Nigeria’s financial system faced at the time. CBN even fined banks who defaulted in reporting cryptocurrency transactions. Later on in the year, the SEC Director-General announced that the commission had inaugurated a department to investigate the crypto industry.
- Following the restriction on the trade of cryptocurrencies in Nigeria, citizens resolved to peer-to-peer platforms to continue processing cryptocurrencies in the country. Nigeria’s Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) then published a new set of rules guiding the issuance, exchange and ownership of digital assets, such as Bitcoins/NFTs in the country.
- A report by Paxful, a major peer-to-peer cryptocurrency platform in Nigeria disclosed that Nigerians traded over N77.5 billion or $185 million of Bitcoin between January – March 2022 despite the restriction on cryptocurrency. This figure is a 5.71% increase from the N73.54 billion of the same period in 2021.