Nigeria has cemented its position as sub-Saharan Africa’s largest stablecoin market, accounting for roughly 60% of all stablecoin inflows into the region since 2019, according to the International Monetary Fund’s latest Article IV consultation report on the country, released in June. The Fund found the activity is driven overwhelmingly by households and small businesses rather than institutional trading, with Nigeria receiving an estimated $59 billion in crypto-asset inflows between July 2023 and June 2024 alone, a figure that placed it second globally in Chainalysis’s 2024 Global Crypto Adoption Index, before slipping to sixth in the 2025 ranking.
The IMF traced part of the shift to the Central Bank of Nigeria’s 2021 directive barring banks from servicing cryptocurrency exchanges, which pushed much of the activity toward peer-to-peer platforms and other less regulated channels. Nigerians have increasingly turned to dollar-pegged stablecoins such as USDT and USDC as a hedge against naira volatility and a cheaper alternative to conventional remittance corridors, which typically charge between five and eight percent per transfer.
Global crypto wallet Bitget Wallet is positioning itself to capture that demand. The self-custodial platform, which surpassed 100 million users worldwide this month, said daily active payment users have begun to outpace trading activity, a shift its Chief Operating Officer, Alvin Kan, attributed to users increasingly treating the wallet as a dollar-denominated account rather than a speculative trading tool. In November 2025, the company launched a direct bank transfer feature in Nigeria that converts stablecoins into naira with instant settlement through partner banks, which it describes as one of the first large-scale efforts to link stablecoin payments directly into a national banking system. The infrastructure behind the feature, Bitget’s Onchain Payments Matrix, has processed more than $177 billion in stablecoin transactions globally across over 80 payment rails.
Card spending data reflects similar momentum: Bitget Wallet Cards, now numbering more than 150,000 issued across over 50 markets, generated $31 million in global spending in the first half of 2026, up 191% from the second half of 2025. In emerging markets including Nigeria, card spending grew 416% over the same period, more than double the global rate.
The IMF cautioned that the trend carries risks alongside its benefits, warning that widespread stablecoin use could resemble a form of digital dollarisation, weakening the transmission of domestic monetary policy and complicating financial integrity oversight as transactions migrate away from regulated institutions.
