The adoption of Cryptocurrency in Africa is progressing, perhaps Jack Dorsey who made the statement that “Africa will define the future (especially the bitcoin one!) in Nov 2019 was right afterall. Nigeria, the most populated country in Africa have since been seeing very huge volumes in transaction of Bitcoin over the couple of month's, it is safe to say Nigeria is finally waking up to Crypto.
According to the statistics presented by the Global Crypto Adoption Index based on the following metrics,
- On chain value received
- On chain retail value received
- Number of on chain deposits
- P2p exchange trade volume
Although Nigeria appears to rank 8 behind 7 other countries, it remains however obvious that the country is leading in the Number of on chain deposit with a score of 112, followed by China with a score of 95.
This statistics shows that Nigerians are beginning to embrace crypto as store of value as a result of a continuously devaluing fiat currency, the inflation in Nigeria is at its peak, measured at 34%/yr, according to stats from Hankes global inflation rate.
A sharp drop in dollar revenues has forced the country’s administration to devalue the currency by more than 20% this year. Still, the naira remains too expensive and a dollar shortage is starting to hurt local businesses, economists say.
“Nigeria is at a critical juncture in its history,” Shubham Chaudhuri, the World Bank’s director in Nigeria, said in a webinar on Thursday. The country has a choice “whether or not to continue business as usual or decisively break from the past,” he said.
Source
The uncertainty and instability in Nigeria's dwindling economy has contributed a major push in fostering adoption of cryptocurrency within the country. This is clearly one of the problems Bitcoin was invented to solve, it is no wonder it is regarded as a safer haven of value for Nigerians which is also similar to the situation in Venezuela.
According to statistics from Paxful, a leading peer to peer Bitcoin market platform, it states that Nigeria has performed trades amounting to over 62,000 Bitcoins which is equal to $566million in the space of five years and constitutes the platforms highest volume.
The stats and figures above only scratch the surface when we compare the population of the youth in Nigeria to the numbers of those who are currently aware and transacting in cryptocurrency. When we realise that the percentage of the population of Youth in Nigeria stands at 53.7% amounting to over 80million of the entire population, then we see that the numbers presently using crypto is only a tip of the ice berg.
This trend in adopting of Crypto is only bound to keep increasing as more applications are being developed to offer people an alternative and more beneficial system, also as more become aware of the technology.
The Nigerian Crypto sphere seems to be currently dominated by traders and Hodlers of Bitcoin, obviously, most are yet to embrace other applications currently available some of which offer the potential to be a source of income with minimal or low investments, especially in the wake of the pandemic where more people are out of jobs than not.
While the rest of the world is waking up to Blockchain and cryptocurrency, the technology itself keeps improving in offering the world many ways for people to benefit from, *From breaking barriers, becoming boderless and permisionless, to being censorship resistant and decentralized, it is no doubt why Crypto is taking on the corrupt practices of the traditional fiat system and turning it on its head.
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