After 20k tweets and over 100 trades, here’s the truth about P2P crypto trade in Nigeria
Breet reveals the truth about P2P in Nigeria after analysing 20,000 related tweets and initiating over 100 trades on different platforms.
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Peer-to-peer (P2P) crypto trading is a simple idea on paper. Instead of buying or selling cryptocurrency directly from a platform, users trade with one another, while the platform provides escrow, basic dispute resolution, and a marketplace to find counterparties.<br />
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In Nigeria, P2P did not just grow organically. It was pushed into the mainstream.<br />
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In early 2021, the Central Bank of Nigeria instructed banks and financial institutions to stop facilitating cryptocurrency-related transactions. While the move was widely described as a “crypto ban,” it did not criminalise crypto ownership or trading.<br />
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What it effectively did was cut off the most straightforward on-ramps and off-ramps: bank transfers to and from crypto exchanges.<br />
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For everyday users, the implication was immediate. You could still hold crypto, but turning it into naira or buying it with naira became a problem.<br />
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This was when the P2P feature — which was usually done on WhatsApp and Telegram — took shape on exchanges. Binance, which is a dominant exchange in the country, rolled out the feature and allowed Nigerians to trade directly with one another using bank transfers.<br />
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Other global platforms followed. If exchanges could no longer touch fiat rails directly, users would.<br />
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The model worked. P2P is now one of the most popular ways to on-ramps and off-ramps, which is probably why Nigeria is consistently ranked among the world’s largest P2P crypto markets, with platforms like Bybit, Bitget, and others processing thousands of trades daily.<br />
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But while P2P solved an access problem, it quietly introduced a new problem, which is uncertainty.<br />
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As adoption grew, so did stories of delayed payments, short-changed transfers, fake alerts, and traders disappearing mid-transaction. These experiences surfaced spo...
