President Bola Tinubu has ended nearly a decade of regulatory guesswork over how Nigeria polices its cryptocurrency market, signing an executive order that hands coordinated oversight to a new council chaired by the Central Bank of Nigeria.
The Presidential Executive Order on Virtual Assets Coordination, 2026, took effect immediately upon signing on 17 July. It was disclosed in a statement by Bayo Onanuga, the President’s Special Adviser on Information and Strategy, and issued under Section 5 of the 1999 Constitution.
Rather than inventing a new regulator, the order does something more surgical: it compels the agencies that already exist – the CBN, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the newly reconstituted Nigeria Revenue Service – to operate from a shared rulebook instead of pulling in different directions.
That distinction matters more than it might sound. For years, operators in Nigeria’s crypto space have complained privately that no one could tell them, with certainty, which regulator’s rules actually applied to their business. The CBN’s 2021 directive barring banks from touching crypto transactions drove much of the market into informal channels.
The SEC, working in parallel, built out its own licensing regime through the 2024 Accelerated Regulatory Incubation Programme. Neither fully displaced the other. Fraudulent platforms thrived in the grey area between them.
Onanuga put it plainly in his statement, saying the order was designed to close these gaps through supervisory coordination rather than by adding new layers of red tape.
A council with teeth, not a new bureaucracy
The Virtual Asset Council sits at the centre of the new framework. The CBN chairs it. The Nigeria Revenue Service and the SEC serve as vice-chairs. The Nigerian Financial Intelligence Unit and the Office of the National Security Adviser round out the membership, a line-up that treats crypto oversight as a security and anti-fraud matter, not merely a financial one.
Jurisdiction has also been drawn more sharply than before. Digital assets classified as securities remain SEC territory. Payment, settlement and custody services built around non-security tokens — largely the stablecoins that dominate everyday crypto use in Nigeria — fall to the CBN. Where classification is genuinely contested, the council itself will make the call.
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A new virtual asset office, based inside the CBN, will run the day-to-day machinery: licensing applications, information sharing and reporting between agencies, all routed through a common supervisory platform.
Three deadlines now matter. The council has 30 days to publish a harmonised implementation framework setting out how licensing and enforcement will work in practice.
The CBN is separately expected to launch a regulatory sandbox, giving fintech and crypto firms a supervised space to trial products before going to market, a model already familiar from the UK, Singapore and the UAE. And the Nigerian Revenue Service is to issue a dedicated tax policy for the sector, closing a question that has hung over Nigerian crypto traders for years.
Why the scale of the market makes this urgent
Nigeria is not tinkering at the margins of the global crypto economy; it is one of its largest retail markets. Chainalysis put the value of cryptocurrency received in Nigeria at roughly $92.1 billion (N126.6 trillion) in the year to June 2025, nearly triple the volume recorded in South Africa, the region’s next-largest market. Some industry estimates now place crypto ownership at close to 40 per cent of the adult population.
Stablecoins do most of the work. They account for close to 40 per cent of Nigeria’s crypto inflows, making the country the largest stablecoin market in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Yellow Card chief executive Chris Maurice has tied that demand directly to Nigeria’s persistent dollar shortage, noting that a large share of African countries are struggling with FX access that leaves businesses starved of the dollars they need to trade.
That is the practical texture behind the policy language: a Lagos trader settling an invoice in a dollar-pegged token, a small importer hedging naira exposure, or a diaspora worker sending money home through a wallet rather than a bank. Regulatory uncertainty has sat on top of all of it.
What changes for businesses, investors and everyday users
For licensed exchanges and virtual asset service providers, the order is, on balance, good news. A single point of coordination should mean fewer conflicting instructions from different agencies, faster decisions on licensing, and a clearer sense of who to approach when a product doesn’t fit neatly into existing categories.
Investors, particularly institutional and diaspora capital that has stayed cautious about Nigeria’s crypto rules, may read the move as a signal that the state intends to regulate the sector rather than periodically raid it.
For ordinary Nigerians already using crypto to save, remit or trade, little changes in the immediate term. Existing SEC registration requirements and CBN rules remain in force while the council works out its implementation details.
The bigger effect, if the framework is applied properly, should show up over the medium term: fewer unlicensed platforms operating unchecked, and clearer recourse when something goes wrong.
The timing is not coincidental. The order arrives roughly a month after the Senate advanced the Virtual Asset Service Providers Regulation Bill, 2026, to its second reading and alongside a Virtual Assets White Paper the government is finalising as a longer-term strategy document. Executive and legislative tracks are moving in step.
The real test starts now
Experts have expressed cautious optimism, noting that the recent move alone does not guarantee success. Nigeria has a well-worn history of standing up coordinating bodies that struggle to make five agencies with different mandates, budgets and institutional cultures actually work as one. The CBN, SEC, NRS, NFIU and ONSA have not historically shared information easily, and a signature on an executive order does not change incentives overnight.
Speaking on the development, financial analyst Ikpikpini Eseoghene Gift said, “For years, crypto in Nigeria sat in a grey zone. The CBN had restrictions. The SEC had rules. But the two were not always talking to each other.
“Operators slipped through the gaps. Fraudulent schemes exploited that confusion. Nigerians lost money to platforms that were not properly registered with anyone. This order closes that gap.”
She argues that the direction is clear. “Nigeria is not moving toward a crypto ban. It is moving toward a more structured, more accountable space where real operators can thrive and fraudsters have fewer places to hide.”
Analysts note that what will decide whether this framework becomes a genuine turning point for Nigeria’s digital asset market or another well-intentioned document gathering dust is what the Virtual Asset Council publishes when its 30-day clock runs out and whether the agencies inside it are prepared to give up a measure of the autonomy they have guarded for years.
Sunday Michael Ogwu is a Nigerian journalist and editor of Pinnacle Daily. He is known for his work in business and economic reporting. He has held editorial roles in prominent Nigerian media outlets, where he has focused on economic policy, financial markets, and developmental issues affecting Nigeria and Africa more broadly.