Looking back, Bitcoin adoption in Nigeria was slow at first because, as Nigerians, we like to take our time to understand any investment before jumping in. But by 2017, Bitcoin started gaining attention, even though the Central Bank of Nigeria told banks to stay away from it. However, we citizens didn’t stop using it. The Nigerian government then claimed that Bitcoin was being used for money laundering, and for this and other reasons, they banned it for the first time. This caused exchanges like Binance to remove the naira from their platforms, throwing Nigerian investors into confusion. But as always, we found a way around it.

After a while, the ban was lifted, but not long after, another issue came up. The government blamed Bitcoin for the naira losing its value, which honestly doesn’t make sense to me. As of now, many popular exchanges have stopped supporting NGN trading and even paused NGN P2P trading. Thankfully, some other exchanges stepped in to help.