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Nigeria Builds a Rulebook for Crypto and Stablecoins: What Fintech Founders and Investors Need to Know
Five years ago, Nigeria told its banks to stop serving crypto customers. Today, the same country has a presidential executive order, two regulators running parallel testing programs, a draft stablecoin rulebook and a regulated naira stablecoin already trading on a public blockchain. The shift from hostility to structure is one of the more consequential fintech stories of 2026, and it is far from finished.
The legal foundation is the Investments and Securities Act 2025, which classifies virtual and digital assets as securities. In practice, that gives the Securities and Exchange Commission authority over issuing, trading and intermediating those assets, and anyone running a digital asset business needs to register with it. Crypto is still not legal tender, and commercial transactions involving digital assets must run through an SEC-registered provider. Banks may open accounts for licensed providers under the Central Bank of Nigeria’s 2023 guidelines, but they are still barred from holding or trading crypto on their own books. Funds can’t hold their own digital assets either, and must use an SEC-licensed custodian that meets a ₦2 billion capital threshold.
The next layer arrived on July 17, when President Bola Tinubu signed the Executive Order on Virtual Assets Coordination. It creates a Virtual Asset Council chaired by the CBN, with the Nigeria Revenue Service and the SEC as vice-chairs and the financial intelligence unit and the national security adviser’s office also at the table, plus a Virtual Asset Office to run the day-to-day work. The order draws a practical dividing line: the SEC keeps assets that behave like securities, while the CBN handles payment, settlement and custody services for non-security virtual assets, including stablecoin payments. That split matters because a single product, such as a dollar stablecoin used for remittances, can sit in both worlds depending on how it’s marketed and used.
Both regulators are now running testing programs. The SEC’s Accelerated Regulatory Incubation Programme admitted a batch of digital asset firms in July, with reports naming Luno’s Nigerian arm, Koinkoin, Bitbarter, Blockvault Custodian, GetEquity, Trovotech and Wrapped CBDC among the companies, and a global exchange, KuCoin, joining a day later. In August, the CBN opened its own sandbox for stablecoin issuers, wallet and custody providers, on-ramp and off-ramp companies, payment processors and settlement infrastructure operators. Applications for its second cohort closed on August 31, giving eligible companies their first supervised route into the market under the new coordinated system. The tax side moved too: the Nigeria Revenue Service published guidelines on taxing virtual assets in the summer, building on the new tax laws that set out a clearer regime for digital assets.
The sharpest edge of the story is the stablecoin rulebook, which the SEC put out for comment on August 20 and which is not final. The draft sorts stablecoins into four tiers with minimum reserves: naira-backed coins need at least 100 percent backing, foreign-currency-backed 120 percent, commodity-backed 100 percent and crypto-backed 150 percent. Algorithmic, reserve-less and synthetic stablecoins would be banned outright. Using any stablecoin in capital market activity would require SEC approval, and foreign stablecoins would need SEC recognition and a local representative. The draft also adds two new license categories, a digital asset platform operator for firms that issue, mint or redeem tokens, with ₦500 million in required capital, and a real-world asset tokenization platform with ₦1 billion. Backing assets would have to sit with SEC-approved, CBN-regulated institutions inside Nigeria, a requirement that could reshape how global issuers approach the market.
The home-grown test case is cNGN, the naira-pegged stablecoin that launched in February 2024 and is often described as Africa’s first regulated stablecoin. Its numbers are modest but telling. After entering the SEC’s incubation program in July, it went live on the Celo network on August 7. At the latest count, roughly ₦2.5 billion, about $1.8 million, was in circulation, cumulative volume had reached around ₦214 billion, close to $157 million, and about 8,200 wallets held the token. Those are small figures next to the dollar stablecoins Nigerians already use informally, which is exactly the problem regulators are trying to solve: moving a market that already exists into a supervised channel.
The history explains the urgency. In 2024, authorities detained Binance executives, delisted naira peer-to-peer trading and froze some fintech accounts, a crackdown that pushed activity underground rather than ending it. The licensed route is now the compliant option for receiving stablecoins such as USDC, and the competitive field is shifting accordingly, with licensed exchanges like Busha and Quidax carrying SEC approval in principle since 2024 and newer entrants queuing behind them. Nigerian platforms are also looking outward, with Roqqu’s acquisition of Flitaa pushing a Lagos-founded crypto business into East Africa.
For fintech founders, the practical takeaways are clear. Registration paths exist, capital requirements are rising, and the final stablecoin rules could still change before they take effect. For investors, the sandboxes offer protection that the earlier gray market never did, though a sandbox is a test environment, not a full license. And for ordinary users, the message is to use registered platforms and check which regulator covers the product in question. The rulebook is being written in real time, and the companies that read it closely now will be best placed when it finally hardens.
