Nigeria Ranks No.2 Bitcoin Market in the World

Over the last five years, Nigeria has traded 60,215 bitcoins, valued at more than $566 million which, apart from the US, is the largest volume worldwide on Paxful, a leading peer-to-peer bitcoin marketplace. The data scraped from Coin Dance shows from the beginning of May 2015 to the middle of November this year, bitcoin trade in Nigeria have increased yearly at least 19% in volume since 2017, and the highest volume (20,504.50) was traded in 2020.

Bitcoin trade had its highest spike of 30% this year during the national lockdown in the country and the highest volume traded during the peak of the pandemic. Between January and September, Paxful reported a 137% increase in new registrations in Nigeria.

Peer-to-peer (P2P) exchanges, which are decentralized platforms that directly connects buyers and sellers without third parties are the most popular way to buy bitcoin in Africa because users do not have to worry about cryptocurrency regulation by the government. Paxful is the largest platform for P2P trade in Africa and overtook LocalBitcoins in June this year to be the Largest P2P bitcoin marketplace in the world, controlling 52% of the market share.

The company says Nigerians make up around a quarter of its customer base with 1.3 million registered accounts. “They mostly use the platform for peer-to-peer and arbitrage trading,” says Nena Nwachukwu, Paxful Nigeria regional manager. “Remittances is also a popular use case.” Nwachukwu says bitcoin transfers are “much cheaper and faster than using traditional money transfer operators.”

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