State of crypto in Nigeria

Rain, tax, a dumb government banning cryptocurrency because they can't control it. These are some of the constants in life and at the time of writing, Nigeria is one of the countries under such terrible policies. Remember some months ago when Emefiele, the governor of Central Bank declared that financial institutions were banned from directly facilitating trade?

I remember that period very well because people who know me and my source of income contacted me from every corner of the country to "check on me". I mean, it actually felt like most people were waiting for the news to call me because the number of "condolence calls" I received were many.

According to the policy by the government, financial institutions that facilitated fiat to crypto transactions were liable to sanction and the bank account of the individual to be closed. The policy had an instant impact, leading to a lot of people pulling out their naira from exchanges.

Crypto can't be kept down, so we decided to use an established but less explored route to perform fiat to crypto transactions. The solution was the P2P approach and I wrote a well-detailed explainer on Leofinance that will aid you to convert your crypto to fiat or fiat to crypto.

The detailed approach basically cuts out the middlemen like Flutterwave and enables people to transact directly with each other. It has its challenges but it has helped us fill in the gap.

More interest

Since the early days of this "bull market", there has been a notable rise in the amount of interest from people in the country. In the past, conversations about cryptocurrencies will be met by crickets. However, these days, people seem to be aware of their existence.

The problem is that for most people I come in contact with, cryptocurrencies are only a tool for speculation and so they're out there buying shitcoins to pump and dump. Nobody actually reads whitepapers or even knows what the assets represent, for the people I come in contact with, it is basically like gambling.

The worst part is that the number of people willing to learn and understand is quite a few. I had a conversation with a friend of mine who had an interest in cryptocurrencies. He asked me about how he can get in and I suggested using Hive to earn it for free.

The person turned down my offer and wanted to know the exact amount of money he can use to enter. Well, I don't know because I entered for free through Hive and learnt more about it along the way.

There is hope

I got wind of a story two days ago about good old Meffy the CBN governor rescinding his view about cryptocurrency. Cointelegraph later caught the story and talked about Meffy's new view of the situation.

According to Meffy, the problem with crypto is that it can be easily used to fund illicit activities like terrorism, so that's why crypto was banned. That's hella weird when you think about it on the surface because I don't think they've ever banned Naira because people get scammed with it.

Anyway, the CBN governor, at the 279th meeting of the Monetary Policy Committee in Abuja, stated that cryptocurrencies will have a place in Nigeria. So at best, we should be expecting some level of regulations on digital assets.

Now I don't like regulations because it often only favors the government, but this is at least a ray of hope. Hopefully, financial institutions will be able to facilitate crypto-fiat transactions and I won't continue keeping my head down like I'm doing something wrong because my means of income is in crypto.