- Nigeria spent five years alternating between banning crypto and quietly becoming one of its biggest global markets. The new Virtual Asset Coordination order suggests the government has finally decided which fight it actually wants to fight.
President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s signing of the Presidential Executive Order on Virtual Assets Coordination, 2026 doesn’t read, on its own, like a dramatic policy shift, it’s an order about coordination, committees and shared technology platforms.
But set against the decade Nigeria’s crypto sector has actually lived through, it’s the clearest signal yet that Abuja has stopped trying to legislate the market out of existence and started trying to work with its scale instead.
The Boom Nobody Planned For
Nigeria didn’t become one of the world’s largest crypto markets because of a government strategy. It became one by accident of necessity.
When the naira weakened sharply in early 2025, Sub-Saharan Africa’s monthly on-chain crypto volume spiked to nearly $25 billion in March alone, a clear outlier in a month when most other regions saw declines, with Chainalysis attributing the surge largely to centralized exchange activity in Nigeria as the sudden currency devaluation pushed more people toward digital assets.
Zoom out to the full picture: between July 2024 and June 2025, Sub-Saharan Africa received over $205 billion in on-chain value, up roughly 52% from the previous year, the third-fastest-growing crypto region in the world, just behind Asia-Pacific and Latin America.
Nigeria led the region by a considerable margin, accounting for $92.1 billion in transactions, nearly triple the volume of second-ranked South Africa. That volume was enough to rank Nigeria 6th globally on Chainalysis’s Geography of Cryptocurrency Report, a top-10 global crypto economy, sitting alongside far larger economies.
Most of that isn’t speculative trading. Stablecoins account for 43% of the region’s total crypto transaction volume, functioning as a practical dollar substitute in a market where official foreign exchange access has been tightly restricted.
A February 2026 YouGov survey found 95% of Nigerian respondents said they would prefer to receive payments in stablecoins rather than in the local currency, a striking vote of no-confidence in the naira from the very population the CBN’s earlier restrictions were meant to protect.
Crypto has also become a cheaper remittance rail: Sub-Saharan Africa received $56 billion in remittances in 2024, even though the region remains the most expensive globally for sending money, with fees averaging 8.78% on a $200 transfer, nearly triple the UN’s 3% target, stablecoins offer freelancers and diaspora families a materially cheaper alternative.
The Restriction Years
This boom happened largely despite Nigerian policy, not because of it. The Central Bank first flagged concern in a 2017 circular, then went further on February 5, 2021, when it ordered banks to suspend all crypto-related accounts, citing money laundering and terrorism financing risks.
The backlash was immediate, the Senate convened hearings within a week, while the IMF publicly backed the CBN’s position and the EFCC separately warned Nigerians against Bitcoin investment.
The ban didn’t kill demand; it rerouted it. Locked out of institutional rails, Nigerians turned en masse to peer-to-peer trading, finding a seller on an exchange, sending naira to their personal bank account, and receiving USDT or Bitcoin in a wallet, circumventing the CBN’s institutional ban entirely.
Regulators sent mixed signals for years afterward. The SEC moved toward acceptance, issuing Digital Assets Rules in 2022 as Nigeria’s first real attempt at comprehensive crypto regulation, while the CBN held its line.
Then, in a reversal that surprised the market, the CBN lifted its ban on December 22, 2023, saying global trends had shown the need to regulate rather than prohibit operators and traders
That reversal didn’t extend goodwill to everyone. Weeks later, in February 2024, CBN Governor Olayemi Cardoso told reporters that $26 billion had passed through Binance Nigeria in the preceding year from sources and users the CBN could not adequately identify, part of allegations that the exchange was enabling naira manipulation.
Two Binance executives were arrested and prosecuted, and by March 5, 2024, Binance had ended naira services in Nigeria entirely.
OKX exited months later. The message was unmistakable: individual ownership was tolerated, but unlicensed platforms operating at scale were not.
Toward Coordination
Out of that turbulence came the scaffolding for what’s now culminating in this Executive Order. The SEC began issuing initial approvals to licensed digital asset companies within months of Binance’s exit, and Nigeria’s 2025 Investment and Securities Act formally recognised crypto assets as securities for the first time, giving the SEC clear statutory authority it had previously operated without.
What Nigeria still lacked was coordination between the SEC, CBN, tax authorities, financial intelligence unit and national security apparatus, exactly the fragmentation the new Executive Order names as its target.
The Virtual Asset Council, CBN-chaired, with the Nigeria Revenue Service and SEC as vice-chairs, and the NFIU and ONSA as members, doesn’t reassign anyone’s existing mandate; it’s designed to close the seams unlicensed operators have historically slipped through. Registration will now follow the nature of the asset: securities-like activity goes to the SEC, payment and custody services involving non-security virtual assets go to the CBN.
A regulatory sandbox, an NRS tax policy for the sector, and a forthcoming Virtual Assets White Paper round out the framework, with a 30-day deadline for the Council to produce a Harmonised Implementation Framework.
The Economic Case for Getting This Right
The stakes here are larger than compliance housekeeping. With Nigeria running roughly $92 billion a year in on-chain value, and Sub-Saharan Africa’s crypto economy growing 52% year-on-year, the tax policy the NRS is now expected to release represents a meaningful, previously uncaptured revenue stream.
Years of ambiguous regulation pushed volume into P2P channels precisely built to be difficult to trace or tax; a coordinated framework that gives operators legal certainty is also, functionally, a framework that gives the state visibility into a market it has spent years unable to see clearly.
Whether this order delivers on that will depend on details still to come: what the CBN’s sandbox actually permits, how the NRS’s tax policy treats the stablecoin volume that dominates real usage, and whether the 30-day Harmonised Implementation Framework produces workable rules rather than another layer of ambiguity for operators to navigate.
