Africa Crypto News: Nigeria Captures 60% of Stablecoin Flows

Nigeria has accounted for around 60% of stablecoin inflows into sub-Saharan Africa since late 2019, according to the International Monetary Fund. Between July 2023 and June 2024, the country received nearly $59 billion in crypto. This dominance facilitates international transfers and payments, but it is now raising concerns at the IMF on another front: the “digital dollarization” of Nigeria’s economy.

Africa Crypto News: Nigeria Already Accounts for $59 Billion

In Nigeria’s rapidly formalizing crypto market, the warning highlighted again this week by Nigeria Communications Week requires some clarification: it is not based on a new report published in September. Nigeria Communications Week is reprising the IMF’s analysis, whose main figures come from the Article IV consultation on Nigeria and an analysis published by the Fund on June 16, 2026.

The figures remain impressive. Nigeria received around $59 billion in crypto assets between July 2023 and June 2024. It also accounted for nearly 60% of stablecoin inflows into sub-Saharan Africa between late 2019 and early 2025. In 2024, stablecoins represented more than 65% of Nigeria’s cross-border crypto inflows.

This growth is accompanying a market that is rapidly becoming normalized. Bref Crypto had already examined how payments and taxation are reshaping Nigeria’s crypto market, valued at more than $92 billion over a more recent period. USDT and USDC clearly dominate the uses identified by the IMF. The country had around 25.9 million digital-asset users in 2025, or roughly 12% of its population.

Why such strong demand? The naira lost significant value in 2023 and 2024, while access to dollars remained difficult. For a household, freelancer or small business, holding USDT thus became a relatively simple way to hold digital dollars.

The IMF Fears Digital Dollarization

This is where stablecoins become a monetary issue. A Nigerian who keeps their savings in USDT is no longer really holding naira. On a small scale, this looks like an individual choice. With several million users, however, the phenomenon could begin to alter demand for the local currency.

The IMF outlines four major priorities for Nigeria: preserving monetary sovereignty, strengthening oversight, improving the data available on crypto flows and modernizing payment infrastructure.

The identified risk is “digital dollarization.” Mass adoption of dollar-denominated stablecoins could intensify currency substitution, complicate the management of capital flows and reduce the effectiveness of certain monetary-policy decisions.

There is also a banking risk. The IMF does not yet observe a mass shift of Nigerian deposits into stablecoins, but warns that this situation could change if these assets become simpler or more attractive than traditional bank accounts.

The government has already begun strengthening its framework. The SEC is notably proposing that 80% of crypto assets held for clients be stored offline, while exchanges and other VASPs face more demanding regulatory requirements.

The IMF is not, however, recommending a ban on USDT or USDC. It believes an attempt to suppress them could simply push more activity into informal channels.

cNGN Remains Tiny Compared with USDT and USDC

Perhaps the most revealing figure in the IMF report concerns the local stablecoin. Nigeria has the cNGN, a private stablecoin pegged to the naira. Yet the data cited by the IMF show that at the beginning of 2025, only 66 million cNGN, or around $44,000, had been issued. The asset was held by roughly twenty wallets and had recorded only 74 on-chain transactions.

Compared with USDT and USDC, the gap is enormous.

Since then, the ecosystem has nevertheless been trying to build more local-currency rails. Bref Crypto recently reported that naira-pegged stablecoins are coming to Celo to develop cross-border payments.

The problem is as much economic as it is technical. A dollar stablecoin already has international liquidity, users, exchanges and thousands of trading pairs. A naira stablecoin has to build all of that.

And yet stablecoins address a real problem. The IMF notes that sending $200 to sub-Saharan Africa still costs around 9% through traditional channels, compared with approximately 6% globally. Digital dollars can sometimes reduce this friction and settle a transaction within minutes.

Nigeria therefore faces a paradox. Stablecoins work precisely because they address certain weaknesses in international payments and provide easy access to the dollar. On a large scale, those are exactly the qualities that could weaken the naira’s position.

The IMF is not telling Nigeria to fight crypto. Rather, it is asking the country to reduce the reasons that push its residents to seek a currency and payment rails elsewhere.

This is a major difference. In this Africa crypto news story, the battle is no longer really between banks and blockchain. It is being fought between the naira, the tokenized dollar and the infrastructure that will carry African payments tomorrow.