Nigeria bans Binance & other major crypto companies
Nigerian government agencies followed India’s strategy to ban the access of the majority of the crypto companies.
Nigeria is a very big region for P2P crypto traders. In 2021, the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) imposed a crypto banking ban as well as ordered all citizens not to trade cryptocurrencies but still people have been actively trading cryptocurrencies via P2P trading methods. In Dec 2023, CBN announced that people could trade cryptocurrencies but maintained crypto banking ban measures.
On 22 Feb 2024, Nigeria restricted the access of major crypto exchanges, including Binance, OctaFX, and Coinbase.
Reportedly the Nigerian government has instructed telecommunication firms to restrict access to these digital assets trading platforms.
This latest decision by the Nigerian government against Cryptocurrency firms raised multiple questions, as the majority of Nigerian crypto entrepreneurs were optimistic about the crypto adoption decision by the country’s central bank.
Local media reports alleged that these major crypto exchanges were responsible for currency pricing on the platform.
Binance stated that its platform was never intended for currency pricing & also restricted the fiat-crypto P2P trading services.
In response to customers’ complaints about the inability to purchase dollars on the platform, the Binance team asserted its commitment to a crypto market-driven and transparent environment. They clarified that it had paused transactions to prevent price suppression.
Under this situation, the majority of Nigerian customers are using Binance & other crypto trade platforms via VPN services.
A similar kind of decision was taken by the Indian government agencies. Just a month ago the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) restricted the access of Binance, Kraken, Kucoin and other crypto firms. These crypto platforms were not registered with the Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) to prohibit money laundering activities.
All such types of situations show a clear picture of the inability of the financial regulators & policy-makers to regulate the crypto sector.
Read also: Giant social media platform Reddit purchases Bitcoin & Ethereum
