Nigeria Blockchain and AI Week 2026 (Lagos, 6–7 November)

Nigeria Blockchain and AI Week 2026 takes place on Friday 6 and Saturday 7 November 2026 at the Landmark Event Centre on Victoria Island, Lagos. Entry to the summit is free with online registration. The event is organised by the crypto news outlet Coin News Extra together with the Fintech Association of Nigeria (FintechNGR), and this sixth edition, as the organisers count it, runs over two days; a 2025 event listing describes last year’s as a one-day event.

It lands at an odd moment for Nigeria. The country ranks among the busiest crypto markets in the world, yet its rulebook is still being written, and the only regulation session on the agenda has no named participants so far.

Programme: AI agents, stablecoin payments and startup pitches

The announcement published by Coin Edition in September gives the 2026 theme as “Agenda 2036”, a title about building a trillion-dollar African digital economy where AI, blockchain and stablecoins meet. The official site lists the topics: AI agents, payments built on stablecoins, decentralised finance in its newer forms, Web3 infrastructure and policy for Nigeria’s digital economy. Formats mix keynotes, panels, workshops, startup pitches and networking.

The published agenda, in Lagos time (WAT, UTC+1), reads as follows. Day 1 opens at 09:00 with a keynote on the state of blockchain in Africa on the Main Stage. From 10:30 to 13:30 a panel on DeFi in emerging markets runs in Room A while Room B hosts a workshop on building AI agents for real uses. A fireside chat titled “Crypto Regulation: What Nigeria Gets Right” follows at 14:00, then the first round of a startup pitch competition at 16:00.

Saturday belongs to the hackathon and the pitches. Teams form at 09:00 for the hackathon, the pitch competition resumes at 10:30 on a separate Pitch Stage, an investor matchmaking session opens at 12:00 and the pitch finals start at 14:00. Hackathon demos and judging begin at 16:00. Day 2 sessions show start times only.

No speaker has been confirmed for 2026. On 19 October the speakers page said the line-up was still being announced, and speaker applications were open. Earlier editions featured officials such as the head of the Nigerian Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the president of FintechNGR, but none of them is announced for this year. The home page invites visitors to “engage” officials of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) and other regulators, without saying who will come or in what role.

Tickets: free summit, gala paid in crypto

Registration for the two-day summit is free on Luma, through the link on the official site. The only paid part for visitors is the Gala Dinner and Awards Night on Saturday 7 November from 19:00 WAT. According to the gala page (read 19 October 2026), seats cost $100 (Regular), $150 (Startup and Innovators) or $300 (VIP) per person, payable in USDT, BTC, ETH and hundreds of other coins through the processor NOWPayments. Each seat includes food and drinks, and the page warns that seats are limited. Dress code and award categories are not published.

Paying a ticket in crypto cannot be reversed, so buy only from the official gala page and not from links sent by private message. Our guide on how to avoid crypto scams lists the usual tricks. Exhibitors have separate booth packages, from $500 to $3,000 at the early-bird rate.

Practical information

The venue is the Landmark Event Centre on Victoria Island. The 2026 page gives no street address; a 2025 event listing placed the same venue at Plot 2 and 3, Water Corporation Drive. The organisers have not named any hotel or transport partner, and no livestream has been announced, although the full 2025 edition is available as a replay video on the site.

Lagos stays on UTC+1 all year. Once Europe moves back to winter time on 25 October, Paris, Rome and Lagos share the same clock, so the 09:00 keynote is also 09:00 in France and Italy. The event does not publish a closing time; Coindaro lists it as running over both full days. Travellers from the EU should check visa rules with the Nigerian embassy and their foreign ministry’s travel advice before booking.

How many people attend? Two figures that do not match

The organiser’s home page claims “10,000+” global attendees, more than 50 speakers and visitors from over 20 countries. Those figures carry no date and are not tied to any edition. The Coin Edition announcement, by contrast, says the 2026 edition expects more than 3,000 attendees and 50 exhibitors. We found no independent count of the 2025 edition, which an event listing dates to a single day, 9 October 2025, at the same venue and alongside Nigeria Fintech Week.

The site shows logos of past sponsors, including Binance, Mastercard, Interswitch and the naira stablecoin cNGN. They are labelled as past sponsors, and no 2026 sponsor or media partner is named yet.

Nigeria crypto rules in 2026: what is confirmed

Nigeria ranked sixth worldwide in the Chainalysis 2025 Global Crypto Adoption Index, published on 2 September 2025 and covering the year to June 2025. It placed third for DeFi use. Chainalysis also measured 52% year-on-year growth in on-chain activity for Sub-Saharan Africa. Much of that activity runs on dollar-pegged tokens; our guide what are stablecoins explains how they work.

The legal frame has moved fast. The SEC says on its website that President Bola Tinubu assented to the Investments and Securities Act 2025, which repeals the 2007 law. According to Mariblock, writing on 2 April 2025, the Act gives crypto legal recognition and treats digital assets as securities under SEC oversight. Reports differ on the exact signing date in March 2025.

On licences, Techpoint Africa reported in August 2024 that the SEC had given the exchanges Busha and Quidax an approval in principle, a first step towards full registration. On 19 October 2026 the SEC’s list of fintech operators, a page dated May 2025, still showed both firms as digital assets exchanges in its Accelerated Regulatory Incubation Program (ARIP), the track for firms that were already trading before the 2022 crypto rules, rather than as fully registered operators.

The newest step came in July. On 17 July 2026 Tinubu signed the Presidential Executive Order on Virtual Assets Coordination, 2026, according to a statement from his adviser Bayo Onanuga reported the same day by the state broadcaster Voice of Nigeria and by Nairametrics. It sets up a Virtual Asset Council chaired by the CBN, with the Nigeria Revenue Service and the SEC as vice-chairs and the financial intelligence unit and the National Security Adviser’s office as members. A Virtual Asset Office at the central bank handles applications and reporting. The order creates no new regulator: assets that are securities stay with the SEC, while payment, settlement and custody services for other virtual assets fall to the CBN. The CBN is due to open a sandbox and the revenue service to issue a tax policy. The council had 30 days to draw up an implementation framework; we found no report that it has been published.

For readers in France and Italy, the contrast is with the single EU rulebook described in our MiCA guide. Nigeria is building its own through several agencies at once, and the 6 November fireside chat is where that work could get a public airing, if officials take the stage.

What is still unknown

As of 19 October 2026, eighteen days before the opening, the organisers have not named speakers, session end times, the event’s closing time, the regulators who will attend, sponsors for 2026 or a livestream. Gala award categories are also missing. Readers who follow African events can compare with the Africa Bitcoin Conference 2026 in our calendar. Registration remains open on the official site.