The price of one Bitcoin (BTC) in Nigeria has ballooned to $68,000, which is around $18,000 higher compared to the current world market rate, mainly as a result of the current exchange rate between the Nigerian naira and the U.S. dollar.
The world’s most popular crypto seems to have shifted gear after sustaining heavy losses earlier this week in the wake of an overly excited derivatives market.
Bitcoin crawled back past the $50,000 level early Wednesday morning, having shed a double-digit percentage decline to as low as $45,000 from all-time peaks around $58,000 by midnight UTC Monday, figures from CoinDesk 20 show.
It’s big, but expensive to buy
Back to Nigeria. Awosika Ayodeji, a Nigerian blockchain project developer, does not have any qualms about the price of the digital asset in his neck of the woods.
He is happy at what he’s seeing — prices of bitcoin quoted using unofficial U.S. currency exchange rates because it means he would be getting more naira per dollar when he converts his digital currency earnings to his local currency.
Based on the listing on LocalBitcoins, 1 BTC is valued at 26,000,000 naira in Nigeria. At the rate of 380 naira per one USD, the price of a single BTC in the country when converted to USD is $68,246 — a sweet 24% premium from current market rates.
However, “buying the crypto becomes more expensive, too,” CoinDesk quoted Ayodeji as saying.
On weakening buying power and crypto ban
In Nigeria, these premiums are not consistent. On peer-to-peer (P2P) platform Paxful, the listed prices for BTC were based on $1 trading for around 475 naira. This rate converted to, say, $54,736 is a price much closer to the average BTC trading price of the day.
One reason for the contrast in prices is the diminishing buying power of the country’s naira. As a result, Nigerians may have to pay more naira for every US dollar. This just shows that the naira actually has a lesser value than what is being said by the government.
Meanwhile, as the country seeks to boost its virtual economy, the central bank’s recent cryptocurrency ban deals a heavy blow on this objective and fuels suspicion about the government.
On Feb. 5, the Central Bank of Nigeria announced it was restricting the exchange of cryptocurrency by financial institutions and ordered banks to close accounts that trade in crypto.
Featured image by Karolina Grabowska/Pexels
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Source: https://bitcoinerx.com/bitcoin/bitcoin-price-in-nigeria-snowballs-to-68000/
