Nigeria’s attempt to tame its booming but unruly crypto market has lurched from one regulatory blueprint to another so many times that the industry has learnt to greet fresh announcements with a weary shrug. Even so, the past fortnight has been disorienting. On July 8, the Securities and Exchange Commission proudly cleared nine fintech firms to enter its Accelerated Regulatory Incubation Programme, a carefully designed path towards a full licence. Ten days later, the presidency tore up the script — or, more precisely, taped a new one on top of it — with an executive order that reassigns key oversight roles and plants the central bank firmly at the centre of a “harmonised” framework.
The sequence has all the hallmarks of a classic Nigerian regulatory drama: two powerful agencies with overlapping mandates, a sudden presidential intervention that promises coordination without creating a new regulator, and a cohort of hopeful companies that have just been told the goalposts may be shifting again. Depending on whom you ask, the shake-up is either a long-overdue tidy-up or a fresh source of confusion.
The SEC’s July announcement was meant to be a milestone. Nine entities — including well-known names such as Luno Fintech Nigeria, KuCoin Nigeria, and a handful of home-grown startups — received Approval-in-Principle to operate under the Accelerated Regulatory Incubation Programme, or ARIP. That status is not a final licence, but it signals that a firm has satisfied the commission’s admission requirements and can now test its virtual asset services in a controlled sandbox while the SEC studies the risks. For an industry that had been buffeted by threats of bans, forced naira delistings from peer-to-peer platforms, and at least a minimum capital of N1bn ($640,000), the clearances felt like the beginning of an orderly licensing wave.
The orderly part lasted fewer than two weeks. On July 17, President Bola Tinubu signed the Presidential Executive Order on Virtual Assets Coordination, 2026, a document that resembles a peace treaty between warring bureaucracies rather than a regulatory overhaul. It creates a Virtual Asset Council chaired by the Central Bank of Nigeria, with the SEC and the Nigerian Revenue Service as vice-chairs, and the financial intelligence unit and national security adviser as members. The council will set policy direction, resolve inter-agency turf wars, and oversee a new Virtual Asset Office — a secretariat housed at the CBN — that will run an integrated supervisory technology platform. A regulatory sandbox for virtual assets will now be run by the central bank, not solely by the SEC, and the CBN is to announce its details shortly.
The order insists it is not stripping any agency of its statutory powers. Instead, it splits the registration of virtual asset activities by their nature: activities that look like securities go to the SEC; payment, settlement, custody and similar services involving non-security virtual assets go to the CBN. Where a case cannot be neatly categorised, the council will decide. In theory, that closes the gaps through which unregistered operators have slipped. In practice, it invites an immediate question: what, precisely, is a “non-security” virtual asset in a market where bitcoin, stablecoins and an ever-growing array of tokens can resemble currency, commodity and investment contract all at once? The order is silent on definitions, leaving that ticklish work to a Harmonised Implementation Framework due within 30 days, and a broader White Paper that the government says is being finalised.
The SEC’s newly admitted ARIP firms now find themselves in an awkward limbo. Their approvals-in-principle were granted under a programme designed before the council existed, at a time when the SEC was the sole gatekeeper for virtual asset service providers that touched the capital market. The order does not revoke those clearances — it goes out of its way to say agencies retain their mandates — but it clouds the licensing path ahead. If a firm’s business straddles securities and non-securities activities, as many crypto exchanges inevitably do, it could end up needing registrations with both the SEC and the CBN, each with its own conditions and supervisory expectations. A fintech executive who asked not to be named described the mood as “cautiously baffled”. “Those that just got the AIP from SEC, and now the CBN is going to run a sandbox. Which one are they supposed to be in? And what if the SEC says they’re a security and the CBN says they’re not? The EO says the council will resolve it, but the council hasn’t met yet.”
The industry’s scepticism is rooted in experience. Nigeria’s crypto regulation has yo-yoed dramatically. In 2021, the CBN ordered banks to close accounts linked to cryptocurrency transactions. That prohibition was reversed in late 2023, but only after the market had migrated to peer-to-peer platforms that the government then tried to squeeze. The SEC stepped into the void with 2024 proposals that shocked many operators: N1bn minimum paid-up capital for exchanges and custodians, compulsory physical offices, and a requirement that directors and senior management collectively own at least 50 per cent of the company. Critics pointed out that Mauritius, an African pioneer in blockchain regulation, demanded barely a seventh of that capital. Binance, the world’s largest exchange, became a lightning rod, halting naira services after allegations of illicit flows and a tug-of-war with authorities. Meanwhile, according to industry data, Nigerians traded an estimated $56.7bn in crypto in the year to mid-2023, a figure that makes both the revenue potential and the systemic risk hard to ignore.
ARIP was the SEC’s pragmatic answer: a fast-track sandbox that let the commission learn while firms operated under tight supervision. The application fee was set at N2m ($1,451 USD), reporting obligations were dense, and customer growth was capped at 10 per cent during the incubation period. It was, in effect, a regulatory audition. The nine firms that made the cut had jumped through all the hoops, only to discover that the stage is now shared with a council whose chairman — the CBN — was until recently the most vocal sceptic of crypto in the federal establishment. The irony is not lost on anyone. The central bank that once warned banks away from digital assets is now charged with harmonising their supervision and hosting the sandbox.
The government’s stated aim is benign: protect citizens from fraud, safeguard the financial system, and stop money laundering and terrorism financing without stifling innovation. The executive order is careful to say it introduces no new layers of regulation, only coordination. But coordination between Nigerian financial agencies has historically been easier to announce than to execute. The order creates a secretariat, a supervisory technology platform, and a council with the authority to make binding determinations, all while asking the Attorney-General to prepare a harmonised legal framework. It is a structure that looks designed to generate as many meetings as memos, and its success will depend on whether the CBN and the SEC can resist the temptation to protect their turf under the guise of cooperation.
Meanwhile, the nine firms are waiting, as are dozens of others that had hoped to follow them into ARIP. The Nigerian Revenue Service is about to issue its own virtual asset tax policy, adding another layer of compliance. The government promises that a comprehensive White Paper will eventually provide the sector with a long-term roadmap. Until then, the message to crypto businesses is quintessentially Nigerian: you are welcome, but please hold while we reconfigure the welcome mat.
Bayo Onanuga, the presidential spokesman, stated that the order “closes gaps through supervisory coordination, without introducing new layers of regulation”. The market will spend the next 30 days, and probably many more, testing whether that promise can survive contact with reality.