Key takeaways:
- With the announcement of the complete termination of all services in the local fiat currency, the Nigerian naira, Binance is leaving the Nigerian market.
- Binance will instantly stop accepting NGN deposits since they won’t be supported after 2:00 PM UTC on March 5.
With the announcement of the complete termination of all services in the local fiat currency, the Nigerian naira (NGN), a major global cryptocurrency exchange, Binance, is leaving the Nigerian market.
The platform will stop accepting NGN withdrawals starting March 8th, as Binance formally said on March 5. The notification stated that beginning on March 8, customers’ remaining NGN funds in their Binance accounts will be automatically converted to Tether stablecoin.
Prior to the termination of these NGN services, the exchange has advised users to take their NGN assets, swap them, or convert their NGN into cryptocurrency. According to the announcement:
“Please note that the conversion rate is calculated based on the average closing price of the USDT/NGN trading pair on Binance Spot in the last seven days,”
Moreover, Binance will instantly stop accepting NGN deposits since they won’t be supported after 2:00 PM UTC on March 5.
The notification states that on March 7, all trading pairs containing NGN would be taken down from Binance. On March 6, NGN will also no longer be accepted as a payment method via Binance Pay, the company’s payment service.
Furthermore, Binance disclosed that all NGN trade pairs were removed from the peer-to-peer platform in late February.
The announcement that Binance has completely removed the Nigerian naira comes as the business is under intense regulatory investigation in Nigeria.
In addition to citing “suspicious flows” of funds at Binance, the governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria stated on February 27 that cryptocurrency exchanges operating in Nigeria were suspected of handling illegal transactions.
In Abuja, Nigeria’s capital, the passports of two executives from Binance were purportedly seized by the country’s National Security Advisor. The executives’ passports, which are British and American citizens, were apparently also seized by the authorities.
Binance CEO Richard Teng has been summoned to appear before the Nigerian House of Representatives Committee on Financial Crimes in response to growing suspicions about Binance’s purportedly illegal operations in Nigeria. Local reports state that the committee chair gave Binance management until March 4 to appear before the committee.
In recent years, Nigeria has become one of the crypto economies with the quickest growth rate worldwide.
Nigeria’s rapid acceptance of cryptocurrencies appears to be met with less leniency from the authorities. An advisor to the president of Nigeria demanded in February 2024 that Binance, KuCoin, and other cryptocurrency trading platforms be banned from operating in the nation. Nigeria’s central bank forbade regulated financial institutions from offering services to the nation’s cryptocurrency exchanges two years ago.
