What does Nigeria know about cryptocurrency?

Regarding the awareness of cryptocurrency in Nigeria today, Israel believes that it’s mostly millennials and Gen Xers between the ages of 18–40 who are most interested in crypto.

“It’s mostly the younger generation today. Usually when I have a friend who’s interested, I tell them to read up on BitCoin Talk. Once they do that, I can start introducing them to trading. But I always tell them how important it is to do their research.”

BitCoin Talk continues to serve as a hub for crypto interest since its 2009 inception, especially as the use of crypto continues to expand across the globe.

Bitcoin Talk users avidly discuss the potential of Bitcoin in Nigeria

A quick search on the site brings up hundreds of threads about the future of Bitcoin in Nigera, covering everything from adoption potential, to trading tips.

Bitcoin itself dominantes as the most used cryptocurrency in Nigeria with ether still lagging behind. Other ERC20 tokens are virtually unheard of.

“Stablecoins are still not widely used or well known. Other ERC20 tokens aren’t either. The main problem is that the Naira isn’t accepted on any major exchanges where you can get ERC20 tokens, and in turn the peer-to-peer trade interest is very low. People know about Bitcoin and know they can make money trading. There’s little interest to save it, and there’s really nowhere to spend it in Nigeria.”

As mentioned before in “The Good, the Bad, and the Ingenuitive: what it is really like to buy and sell cryptocurrency across the globe,” many Nigerians first became aware of cryptocurrency after the Mavrodi Mondial Moneybox Ponzi scheme that implicated many Nigerians in 2016. Despite this shaky first impression, the country has become very interested in Bitcoin, and began to see cryptocurrency as the future of finance in Nigeria.

According to Israel, most Nigerians use Bitcoin (and on a lesser scale, ether) as a means of making additional revenue as a crypto trader. But without major exchanges to trade on, how are they trading?