Why Nigeria is Africa’s most important Bitcoin market?
According to data retrieved from Google trend, Nigeria, Africa’s most powerful economy in GDP terms has been adjudged the only country with a perfect score on interest in bitcoin.
Despite the crypto transactions restrictions imposed by Nigeria’s apex bank, Nigerians traded bitcoins worth over $218 million in the last 6 months. Kenya and Ghana traded bitcoins worth about $90 million and 68 million respectively over the same period.
Using data from two widely-used peer-to-peer exchanges in the country, LocalBitcoins and Paxful, Usefultulips.org identifies that there is an increase in usage of peer-to-peer trading. The nation’s actual trade volume is higher than expected when adding centralized exchanges data.
Earlier this year, Paxful disclosed that Nigeria was its most important market adding that it had 1.5 million customers. Chainalysis also recently reported that the cryptocurrency market in Africa’s most populated country and other African countries grew by 1200% in the last year.
In spite of Nigeria exiting its second recession in less than five years, alternative income like trading on bitcoin remains attractive, given the challenging economic climate.
During the period between July 2020 and June 2021, African nations received $105.6 billion in bitcoins. Thus, it is not surprising to see crypto brands like Binance, Paxful, FTX, and Crypto.com print their labels in Nigeria, since the country already has one of the fastest-growing crypto markets.
Because Nigeria has a large population within the age range of the tech-savvy, it’s easy for its citizens to adopt bitcoin use. Nonetheless, this is not the only reason for Nigerian youth’s adoption of bitcoin.
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Nigerian youth prefer to store assets in bitcoins and stablecoins, since the naira, like all fiat currencies, is susceptible to inflation.
An average Nigerian struggle to receive payments from foreign clients due to this problem. Even the most well-known American payment service, Paypal is not allowed, and other options such as Money Gram and TransferWise are not only expensive and slow but also hard to use.
While bitcoin’s borderless feature makes payments effortless, and its transaction fees are extraordinarily low when compared to traditional channels.
In order to sustain its dominance in the largest economy in Africa, it has announced its global integration on the Lightning Network. With the Lightning Network at their fingertips, Paxful users can now benefit from the power of the Bitcoin (BTC) network.
Users can transfer Bitcoin in seconds and at a much lower fee thanks to the Lightning Network.
Paxful can now offer its users lower user fees than traditional Bitcoin transactions, thanks to this new feature. Users access their bitcoin balance through the Lightning Network, the same way they would if they were transferring it over the bitcoin network with their Paxful Wallet.
As part of its support for the Human Rights Foundation, Paxful has committed to funding the Qala Fellowship, a program that identifies and develops local Nigerian talent for careers in the bitcoin industry.
In a statement released recently, the company announced it was donating alongside the Built with Bitcoin Foundation, an organization dedicated to providing equal opportunities to people, treat water, educate children, and provide humanitarian assistance.
