Nigerians defy CBN’s ban, double Bitcoin transactions in May – Paxful

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Pax­ful, a cryp­tocur­ren­cy trad­ing plat­form, has report­ed a surge in week­ly trans­ac­tions on its Light­ning Network. 

This is despite the Cen­tral Bank of Nigeria’s restric­tions on cryp­tocur­ren­cy trans­ac­tions in the coun­try and the crash­ing prices of cryp­tocur­ren­cies globally. 

Accord­ing to the trad­ing plat­form, the vol­ume of mon­ey sent by Nige­ri­ans via the net­work dou­bled from Octo­ber 2021 to May 2022. 

The state­ment from Pax­ful read in part, “Pax­ful, the lead­ing glob­al peer-to-peer (P2P) fin­tech plat­form announced that week­ly trans­ac­tions on the Light­ning Net­work have increased tremendously.”

It added, “In Nige­ria, the vol­ume of mon­ey being sent out on Light­ning has dou­bled from Octo­ber 2021 to May 2022.” 

Pax­ful fur­ther dis­closed that glob­al­ly, deposit vol­ume increased five times since the plat­form launched its inte­gra­tion on the Light­ning Net­work in Sep­tem­ber 2021. 

Pax­ful not­ed that the deposit vol­ume increased by 54 per cent in April.

The CEO, and founder of Pax­ful, Ray Youssef, not­ed that Nige­ria was one of the coun­tries with the high­est Bit­coin trade vol­ume in the first week of May this year. 

He said, “In the first week of May, Nige­ria was one of the coun­tries with the high­est Bit­coin trade vol­ume on Pax­ful along­side the Unit­ed States, Ghana, Chi­na, and Kenya. Today, we have over 70 coun­tries using Light­ning on Paxful.” 

Between 2015 and 2020, Nige­ri­ans have trad­ed $566m worth of Bit­coin across var­i­ous cryp­tocur­ren­cy trad­ing plat­forms, mak­ing the coun­try the sec­ond largest peer-to-peer Bit­coin mar­ket after the Unit­ed States, accord­ing to news.bitcoin.com.

Nige­ri­ans trad­ed at least N77.75bn ($185m) worth of Bit­coin in the first three months of this year, accord­ing to Pax­ful, which is a 5.71 per cent increase from the N73.54bn worth of Bit­coin that was trad­ed in the cor­re­spond­ing peri­od of 2021. 

Accord­ing to the firm, Nige­ria was its largest trad­ing coun­try in 2021 with 16,000 dai­ly trades. The mar­ket cap of BTC dropped by $36.90bn from $902.10bn as of Jan­u­ary 1, 2022, to $865.20bn as of March 31, 2022. 

This was despite the CBN’s restric­tions on cryp­tocur­ren­cies in the nation. In Feb­ru­ary of 2021, the CBN asked banks in the nation to stop trans­act­ing in and with enti­ties deal­ing in cryp­to assets. 

The bank said, “Fur­ther to ear­li­er reg­u­la­to­ry direc­tives on the sub­ject, the bank here­by wish­es to remind reg­u­lat­ed insti­tu­tions that deal­ing in cryp­tocur­ren­cies or facil­i­tat­ing pay­ments for cryp­tocur­ren­cy exchanges is prohibited.”

How­ev­er, the Pres­i­dent of Stake­hold­ers in Blockchain Tech­nol­o­gy Asso­ci­a­tion of Nige­ria and Gen­er­al Sec­re­tary of Blockchain Indus­try Coor­di­nat­ing Com­mit­tee of Nige­ria, Sen­a­tor Ihenyen, urged the CBN to rethink its stance on crypto. 

Since the restric­tion, P2P trad­ing of cryp­to, espe­cial­ly BTC, has increased. Accord­ing to a 2021 report by Chainal­y­sis, the nation is the sixth lead­ing nation in the world in terms of cryp­to adoption. 

A recent report by KuCoin, a cryp­to exchange with over 10 mil­lion reg­is­tered users, dis­closed that about 33.4 mil­lion Nige­ri­ans trad­ed or owned cryp­to assets. 

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