Quidax courts banks and asset managers as stablecoins spread in Nigeria
- Quidax says it will help banks, asset managers and fintechs offer stablecoins to their customers over the next five years.
- The SEC says Nigeria received over $92.1bn in on-chain value between July 2024 and June 2025, the largest in Sub-Saharan Africa.
- The IMF warns wider stablecoin use could weaken demand for the naira and complicate efforts to track money flows.
Banks, asset managers and fintech companies in Nigeria are weighing whether to offer stablecoins and other digital assets to their customers, according to Buchi Okoro, co-founder and chief executive of the crypto exchange Quidax.
Okoro said Quidax wants to be the infrastructure and compliance partner for those institutions as they move into the market. He spoke at The Exchange, an invitation-only event on stablecoins and digital assets that Quidax hosted with Tether, the issuer of USDT, at the Lagos Continental Hotel. Regulators, fintech executives, and legal and audit professionals attended.
Stablecoins are digital tokens designed to hold a steady value, usually by being pegged to the US dollar. Unlike Bitcoin, whose price swings widely, dollar-backed tokens such as USDT and USDC are built to stay close to one dollar each.
For many Nigerians, that dollar link is the appeal. Stablecoins are increasingly used to send money abroad, pay for imports and hold savings in dollars when the naira is weak.
Why it matters
John Briggs, head of the Securities and Exchange Commission's (SEC) Lagos zonal office, said Nigeria received more than $92.1bn in on-chain value between July 2024 and June 2025. That made it the largest recipient in Sub-Saharan Africa, he said, citing Chainalysis data. The region as a whole took in over $205bn, up about 32 per cent year on year.
Briggs, who represented SEC director-general Emomotimi Agama, said Nigeria ranked third globally in the 2026 Global Crypto Adoption Index and first in peer-to-peer activity and cross-border flows.
"These are not abstract statistics. They are Nigerians who are traders, families, young entrepreneurs," he said.
The International Monetary Fund (IMF), in a June 2026 analysis, estimated that Nigeria accounted for about 60 per cent of stablecoin inflows into Sub-Saharan Africa between late 2019 and early 2025. It linked part of the growth to naira depreciation, inflation and limited access to foreign exchange in 2023 and 2024.
The IMF also warned that wide stablecoin use could encourage "digital dollarisation", weaken demand for the naira and make monetary policy less effective. It flagged money laundering risks and the difficulty of monitoring wallet transactions outside regular banking channels.
What happens next
Okoro said trust, not technology, will decide how far institutions go. "Trust is the new currency," he said, adding that regulation and transparency would have to carry what a bank branch handshake once did.
Quidax and Busha received approval-in-principle from the SEC in August 2024, the first crypto platforms to get that recognition. The SEC said on 29 October that no digital asset operator had yet obtained final registration under its Accelerated Regulatory Incubation Programme, and that approvals-in-principle remain conditional on continued compliance.
For banks and asset managers, that means customer checks, transaction monitoring, custody of digital assets and investor protection will all need to be settled before stablecoin services reach ordinary customers.