Nigeria overtakes Kenya to claim the first position as the leading country with crypto adoption rate in Africa.
Investors King learnt that Nigeria leads other African countries in cryptocurrency adoption so far in 2021. Nigeria which is also Africa’s largest economy ranked 11th in the world position.
Other African countries on the world list include Morocco which came 2nd in Africa and 14th in the world.
Kenya which led the African continent in 2021 was ranked 3rd in Africa and 19th on the global list.
The ranking which was conducted by Merchant Machine used five different indexes which include; On-chain cryptocurrency value received at centralized exchanges, On-chain retail value received at centralized exchanges, Peer-to-peer (P2P) exchange trade volume, On-chain cryptocurrency value received from Defi protocols, and On-chain retail value received from Defi protocols.
The report further stated that despite the ban on cryptocurrency-related transactions by the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), about 33.4 million Nigerians still traded or hold crypto assets.
Millions of Nigerian youth have taken to cryptocurrency in recent years either as a way to attain financial freedom or to hedge against the downward pressure on the naira.
Google trend ranked Nigeria as the country with the highest number of bitcoin searches in the world.
The challenging economy and the high rate of unemployment which the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) has put at 33.3 percent have made many Nigerians take to cryptocurrency as an alternative way of revenue not minding the volatility risk.
Besides, some Nigerians have found employment opportunities in the cryptocurrency industry either as cryptocurrency content writers, blockchain developers, cryptocurrency influencers or NFT creators.
Meanwhile, many cryptocurrency investors believed that bitcoin and a host of other digital assets are trading at discounts.
Although bitcoin is trading below 20,000 dollars at the time of this report, many cryptocurrency investors, however, believed that the market will soon rebound.