Nigeria expects to exit a global dirty-money watchlist this year after passing a new investment law that will allow regulation of cryptocurrencies, the chief of its financial regulator said.
“I am 100% hopeful” the nation will exit the Financial Action Task Force’s so-called gray list this year, Securities and Exchange Commission Director-General Emomotimi Agama said.
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Nigeria has taken steps to fix shortcomings in its anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism finance monitoring identified by FATF when it placed the West African nation on the list in 2023. Another reason was the lack of legislation to cover the regulation of digital assets.
President Bola Tinubu last month signed a law that handed oversight of the industry to the SEC. The new Investment and Securities bill will pave the way for crypto operators to be legally monitored.
Agama said he hopes to grant full cryptocurrency exchange licenses within the next two years and the SEC is reviewing applications from Yellow Card Financial Inc. and others to join a so-called incubation process to put them on trial and watch how things work.
“For us, it is a learning process and the idea is to study, to observe what they do, how they do it and what are the risks involved,” Agama said. “We are working to develop more people, train more people to build capacity for the regulation of digital assets.”
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Nigeria’s youthful and digital-savvy population has adopted cryptocurrencies as a hedge against high inflation and the steep depreciation of the naira since mid-2023. Africa’s most populous nation ranked second worldwide in an index of global cryptocurrency adoption calculated by blockchain analytics company Chainalysis in a 2024 report.
