At a time when Nigeria is struggling to service its debt, finance budgets and embark on fresh capital projects, the Central Bank of Nigeria issued a statement banning crypto currencies in Nigeria.
The apex bank did not give any reason for its drastic action.
In the last two decades, the global economy inevitably started to move towards a digital eco-system. From investment to money transfer, everything is going paperless.
The newest and most promising addition to the digital payment sector is cryptocurrency.
Last month a football club bought a player using Bitcoin, a move that signaled the acceptability and ground shifting to digital economy by the world’s financial ecosystem.
Apart from crude oil and agricultural products, crypto currencies as an emerging market was part of the sources that was powering our economy.
The blockchain economy is worth more than 100 billion dollars to date and the future of its adoption is being championed by people around the world and companies, such as 1World Online, that are using tokens to enhance their platforms–and reward users.
India, with its large base of consumers, engineers, and entrepreneurs, is poised to become a world leader as more and more blockchain participation, investment, development, and mining occurs within its borders.
I doubt if this harsh decision was thought through.
It doesn’t make any sense to me, perhaps when the government decided to give cogent reasons for its action.
I feel, some agents are out to drag Nigeria back to the stone age.
The cryptocurrency revolution is also spreading to India, where Prime Minister Narendra Modi has reduced circulation of cash bills to steer the country towards electronic payment ratification. The Reserve Bank of India is now looking into the newest wave of the future — cryptocurrency.
A year ago, the Indian government decided to take harsh measures against “black money”, funds earned on the black market on which income and other taxes have been evaded, and tax evasion by removing two of their highest value banknotes from circulation resulting in removing over 22 billion banknotes in circulation.
As a result, citizens worried about losing their savings, switched to cryptocurrency to preserve their funds resulting in a trading volume spike of cryptocurrency.
Since cryptocurrency is decentralized, Indian regulators are currently working on a legal framework regulating cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin as well as the central bank of India is developing their own blockchain result resulting in its very own cryptocurrency that will be called “Lakshmi”.
This decision has rendered hundreds of thousand of Nigerians jobless.