Nigerians have traded more than $1.16 billion in bitcoin on Paxful between January 2021 and June 2022 amidst the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) ban on trading cryptocurrencies.
In February 2021, the Central Bank of Nigeria put out a circular notifying financial institutions and other deposit-taking entities against facilitating crypto and digital assets transactions.
The ban on crypto exchanges running bank accounts was expected to have a negative effect on the growth of the market, especially for large crypto brands operating in the country.
However according to local reports, one of the leading P2P crypto exchanges in Africa, Paxful, is happy with the amount of business and activity it has witnessed in Nigeria over the last one year while hte ban was in effect..
In 2021, Nigerians on Paxful:
- Traded $760 million
- Executed 6 million transactions or 16, 000 transactions daily
- Represented 25% of the total global trade volume
Nigeria was therefore Paxful’s leading market based on trading volumes.
According to Paxful, global trading volumes were $3 billion. Thus, Nigeria’s $760 million represented just over 25% of total trade volume for Paxful in 2021.
Going further into the data, Paxful indicated that Nigerians traded over $400 million within the first half of 2022, and the 2022 volume is on – course to surpass 2022 volume. Paxful said that this trend demonstrates that ‘the emerging markets are still hungry for Bitcoin.’
The P2P platform also saw the growing performance as a good indicator, saying that ‘despite the global financial crisis, Paxful is seeing that peer-to-peer and interest in Bitcoin are not slowing down.’
While there are other P2P players in Nigeria, such as Binance and BuyCoins, Paxful is the only P2P exchange P2P exchange that has published its data and made it available to the public.
