Nigerian Engagement With Bitcoin and Virtual Currencies Has Spiked in Recent Months

Bitkoin.Africa enters a relatively crowded market of companies providing exchange services to the Nigerian bitcoin community, with Luno, Remitano, and NairaEX already competing for the loyalty of local cryptocurrency users. Shopnow.ng, an e-commerce website claiming to be the first of its kind in Nigeria to solely accept bitcoin as a means of payment, opened its doors in recent months – suggesting that cryptocurrency demand and adoption is growing locally.

Shopnow is reported to have stated that “bitcoin is becoming more popular in Nigeria and today the country has the highest volume of Bitcoin transactions in Africa and according to google trends, Nigeria is the country that searches the word “Bitcoin” the most on google.com in the whole world.” P2P bitcoin trading on localbitcoins has shown a steady rise in volume since November 2016. Weekly trading volume has oscillated between the 900,000,000 – 1,100,000,000 Nigerian Naira area in recent weeks, excluding the sudden spike that established the current all-time high of approximately 1,866,600,000 during the week of the fifth of August.

The increased entrance of Nigerian investors into the cryptocurrency markets has not gone unnoticed by the country’s Central Bank. Last month, the Deputy Director of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), Musa Jimoh, stated that the apex bank “cannot stop the tide of waves generated by the blockchain technology and its derivatives”, during a recent conference in Lagos. Speaking at the same conference, David Isiawe, President of the Information Security Society of Nigeria, stated “the reality… is that the distributed ledger technology, blockchain and cryptocurrency are facts that we must face, whether we like it or not. We cannot wish this reality away.”