Binance, the Special Adviser to the President Bola Tinubu on Information and Strategy, Bayo Onanuga has observed that a cryptocurrency platform, Binance could harm Nigeria’s economy if no action is taken to stop it.
According to a report from the Financial Times on Wednesday, Nigeria is taking action against cryptocurrency exchanges, resulting in the detention of two high-level executives from Binance.
Binance Holdings Ltd., branded Binance, is a global company that operates the largest cryptocurrency exchange in terms of daily trading volume of cryptocurrencies.
The Holdings Limited was founded in 2017 by Changpeng Zhao, a developer who had previously created high-frequency trading software.
It has been operating in Nigeria since.
Onanuga said, “If we don’t clamp down on Binance, it will destroy the economy of this country. They just fix the rate,”
“We have saboteurs. Look at what Binance is doing to our economy. That is why the government moved against Binance. Some people sit down using the cyberspace to dictate even our exchange rate, hijacking the role of the CBN.
“They just sit down and fix anything they like. It’s a sabotage and we are trying to prevent that from happening henceforth.”
“The parallel market is not the real gauge of Nigeria’s economic health. The parallel market is an illegal market.
“I don’t even know why Nigerians and the media are feeding on the parallel market. That is not where we should go; what’s the CBN rate? As at Friday, the rate for the dollar was about N1600.
“Even in the so-called parallel market, the exchange rate is stabilizing there and that is what this needs. Our economy is too much dollarised. Importers are looking at the exchange rate and using it to fix prices, some of them arbitrarily, some of them actually profiteering,” Presidential spokesman, Bayo Onanuga said