For a country whose central bank once drew a firm line between the banking system and the world of cryptocurrency, Nigeria has travelled a remarkable distance.
In the span of five years, the nation has moved from restriction to measured engagement, and now to an attempt at coordinated governance of one of the era’s most consequential financial innovations.
How well that attempt succeeds will matter to millions of Nigerians who already hold, trade and transact in digital assets.
On 17 July 2026, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu signed the Presidential Executive Order on Virtual Assets Coordination, 2026, establishing a Virtual Asset Council to harmonise the oversight of digital assets across the country’s financial, revenue, capital markets and security institutions.
Issued pursuant to Section 5 of the 1999 Constitution and effective immediately, the Order marks a clear shift. Nigeria has stopped treating virtual assets as a phenomenon at the margins of its financial system and has begun treating them as an economic reality that must be governed.
The significance lies not in the acceptance of virtual assets, which the market had already made inevitable, but in the attempt to replace fragmented supervision with a coherent system.
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The journey here has not been linear. In February 2021, the Central Bank of Nigeria directed banks and other regulated institutions to refrain from facilitating cryptocurrency transactions.
The CBN presented the restriction as a prudential response to volatility, illicit-finance risks, and limited regulatory visibility into a then-poorly understood asset class. In practice, however, it pushed substantial activity into peer-to-peer channels that were harder to monitor, while demand continued to rise.
Nigeria’s young and digitally confident population embraced virtual assets for trading, cross-border payments, savings and protection against inflation and currency depreciation. Powerful network effects took hold, with each new user making the ecosystem more valuable to the next, and what began as curiosity matured into a macroeconomic phenomenon.
The scale is significant. Chainalysis data cited by the International Monetary Fund put Nigeria’s crypto-asset inflows at about US$59 billion between July 2023 and June 2024.
Nigeria ranked second globally in the 2024 Global Crypto Adoption Index and sixth in 2025, and has accounted for about 60 per cent of stablecoin inflows into sub-Saharan Africa since 2019.
These estimates are imperfect, as all measurements of decentralised activity must be, but they leave little doubt that virtual assets are now part of the financial life of ordinary Nigerians.
Economics teaches that money performs three classical functions: a medium of exchange, a unit of account and a store of value. Virtual assets perform these functions unevenly, and therein lies both their allure and their complexity.
Bitcoin and its kin have been embraced as a speculative store of value, yet their volatility denies them any serious claim to being a unit of account; no trader prices garri in a currency that can swing ten per cent before nightfall. Stablecoins, by contrast, approximate a medium of exchange with considerable fidelity, settling value across borders in minutes.
In an inflationary era that has tested currencies across the emerging world, households have quietly engaged in currency substitution at the margin, holding part of their wealth in digital dollars. Virtual assets, in other words, are not merely a new asset class.
They are an unbundling of money itself, with each function migrating to the instrument that performs it best, and this unbundling makes supervision genuinely difficult.
By December 2023, the CBN had revised its position, issuing guidelines permitting banks to serve licensed Virtual Asset Service Providers under strict due diligence and anti-money laundering requirements.
The Investments and Securities Act, 2025 then brought digital assets expressly within the securities framework, building on rules the Securities and Exchange Commission had already developed for offerings, exchanges and custodians.
Nigeria was no longer debating whether virtual assets existed. It was deciding who should regulate which activities, under what rules and with what information.
That task exposed the coordination problem that confronts every jurisdiction dealing with this asset class. The CBN, the SEC, the Nigeria Revenue Service, the Nigerian Financial Intelligence Unit and the security agencies each held part of the regulatory picture, overlapping in some areas and leaving gaps in others.
Virtual assets do not respect the traditional boundaries between money, securities, commodities and technology on which regulatory architecture worldwide was built. A stablecoin may be a store of value to its holder, a payment instrument to a merchant, a financial asset to an investor and a potential money-laundering channel to an intelligence analyst.
It is in the spaces between those statutory lenses that mischief finds room to breathe, for opportunists are alert to regulatory arbitrage, the exploitation of seams between supervisory regimes.
Unregistered schemes, dressed in the borrowed language of cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence, have preyed on unsuspecting savers, and the SEC has repeatedly warned against them. The losses resist precise measurement; the human consequences do not.
The Executive Order addresses this fragmentation through coordination rather than institutional consolidation, and the design has important advantages. The Virtual Asset Council is chaired by the CBN, with the Nigeria Revenue Service and the SEC as vice-chairs, and the NFIU and the Office of the National Security Adviser completing the membership.
A Virtual Asset Office domiciled at the CBN will handle day-to-day coordination of information sharing, applications and reporting, supported by an integrated supervisory technology platform that provides shared visibility while each institution retains control of its data.
Significantly, the Order creates no new regulator and transfers no statutory powers. Securities-related activities remain within the SEC’s jurisdiction. The CBN retains responsibility for payments, settlement and custody outside the securities perimeter.
Where classification is unclear, the Council coordinates the response. The framework coordinates the institutions without displacing their statutory mandates, and the directive to produce a Harmonised Implementation Framework within 30 days signals urgency.
That urgency should be matched by legal clarity and proper consultation, for frameworks built on both endure longest.
The economic stakes justify the effort, for virtual assets sit at the intersection of three consequential flows.
The first is cross-border payments. Stablecoins can reduce the transaction costs and settlement times of conventional channels, where sending US$200 to sub-Saharan Africa costs about 9 per cent of the amount against a global average near 6 per cent.
However, because most stablecoins are dollar-linked, widespread use may also weaken demand for the naira and complicate the monetary transmission mechanism through which policy rates reach the real economy.
The eNaira, launched in October 2021 when Nigeria became the first African country to issue a central bank digital currency, may form part of the response, particularly as a low-cost naira-denominated payment instrument.
But its success will depend on usability, acceptance and confidence in the underlying currency. Technology alone cannot resolve the incentives driving demand for dollar-linked assets.
The second is capital formation. Tokenisation could broaden access to financial assets, unlock fractional ownership of bonds, funds, real estate, and commodities, and advance financial deepening by channelling savings towards the economy’s financing needs with greater allocative efficiency.
The caveat is that technology does not dissolve credit, liquidity or governance risks. Tokenising a weak asset does not strengthen the asset; it changes only the ledger on which ownership is recorded. The framework’s value will lie in distinguishing genuine innovation from the digital repackaging of fragile investments.
The third is public revenue. A supervised sector offers the Nigeria Revenue Service a pathway to a sizeable taxable base, and the Order directs the NRS to develop tax policy and sector-specific guidance. Clarity on trading gains, staking income, token issuance, and cross-border transfers will support compliance and provide legitimate operators with certainty.
The Order also provides for a regulatory sandbox at the CBN, which could support learning on both sides if entry criteria, testing periods and a credible path to full authorisation are published in advance.
In parallel, the Federal Government is finalising a Virtual Assets White Paper, whose usefulness will depend on how concretely it addresses licensing, asset classification, stablecoin reserves, custody, cybersecurity, dispute resolution, taxation and offshore operators serving Nigerians.
An Executive Order is a foundation, and its value will be revealed by what is built upon it. Three considerations will shape the outcome.
The first is collaboration. Councils succeed when members bring institutional strength to a shared table. The CBN’s convening authority, the SEC’s statutory stewardship under the ISA 2025, the NRS’s fiscal insight and the intelligence community’s vigilance are complementary.
The Implementation Framework must define boundaries precisely, set procedures for classifying assets and assigning lead regulators, and answer a question of real practical weight: a single, coordinated regulatory entry point, sparing serious operators parallel applications, would itself be a landmark achievement.
The second is calibration. The Order aims to protect citizens while enabling responsible innovation, objectives that sit in genuine tension. Oversight that is too light exposes consumers to fraud.
Oversight that is too heavy may send capital and talent towards more predictable jurisdictions, and the compliance burden must not fall hardest on registered domestic operators while offshore platforms serve Nigerians through a website and a wallet.
The path between is proportionality: transparent licensing, published standards and timelines. Nigeria’s payments experience provides useful lessons here.
The third is capacity. Virtual asset supervision requires specialised knowledge in blockchain analytics, cyber forensics, digital custody and market surveillance, skills every jurisdiction is racing to cultivate. The supervisory platform will be only as effective as the people interpreting its data.
Sustained investment in talent and disciplined, transparent partnerships with universities, professional bodies and responsible industry participants will matter more than any organogram.
Running through all three is consumer protection. Retail markets for virtual assets are marked by pronounced information asymmetry, where the operator knows far more than the saver, and disclosure rules exist to correct that imbalance.
A licence is a mark of standards, not a guarantee against loss. Nigerians will be best served by clear risk disclosures, segregation of customer assets, sound custody arrangements and clarity on which institution coordinates recovery should a platform fail.
Nigeria approaches this task with an advantage few countries possess: deep grassroots adoption joined to substantial financial-sector expertise, payments innovation and entrepreneurial energy.
If the Council executes its mandate well, Nigeria could define what credible virtual asset supervision looks like in a large emerging market and offer a workable template to the continent.
The President has signed the Order. The harder task now falls to the institutions charged with implementing it. They must share information, respect statutory boundaries, build technical capacity and protect the public. Nigerians deserve a framework that works not only on paper, but in practice.
Dr Tope Fasoranti is an Economist, Banker, and Enterprise Transformation Strategist
Nairametrics
