Nigeria ranked third in the world for crypto adoption in the 2026 Global Crypto Adoption Index that Chainalysis published on 23 September 2026, behind Brazil and the United States and ahead of Japan and India. South Africa came ninth. No other African country made the top 20, yet the same report says Sub-Saharan Africa “led the world in growth on the back of exceptionally strong peer-to-peer activity”. Any honest account of blockchain in Africa starts there: people use crypto to get a job done.
The job is mostly about money: holding dollars when the naira or the shilling loses value, and sending money home across borders. The projects run by states did worse: the Central African Republic made bitcoin a reference currency in April 2022 and its parliament reversed the law in March 2023, while Nigeria’s eNaira, launched in October 2021, never reached everyday use and is now being rebuilt as back-end plumbing. What grew instead is private: companies that turn dollar stablecoins into local money and plug into mobile money wallets such as M-Pesa.
This lesson follows the one on blockchain for intellectual property and music royalties in the use-cases path. It is the first to look at one continent rather than one sector. Figures carry their date, and the state of play is as of October 2026.
Blockchain in Africa is mostly about money that holds its value and moves
Chainalysis, the blockchain analytics firm, gives the reasons in its September 2025 report on Sub-Saharan Africa. On-chain volume in the region reached nearly $25 billion in March 2025 alone, which Chainalysis attributes largely to Nigerian exchange activity after “a sudden currency devaluation”. Persistent inflation and limited access to foreign currency make stablecoins, tokens that track the US dollar, an attractive substitute for a dollar bank account. Across the region the firm points to the large share of adults without a bank account and to a growing business-to-business sector that uses stablecoins for cross-border trade payments.
Remittances are the second use. The World Bank estimates that sending money within or to the region costs close to 8% of the amount sent on average, according to a July 2026 report by Ecofin. A stablecoin transfer costs a fraction of that on chain; the expensive part is turning it back into cedis, shillings or francs at the other end, which is why the off-ramp companies matter more than the blockchain itself.
The third use is a link between mobile money, which hundreds of millions of Africans already use, and the global dollar rails that stablecoins run on. The fourth is older and smaller: civic projects for land titles, medicine tracking and identity, most of which stayed at the pilot stage. They have their own lessons and get a short section at the end.
If stablecoins are new to you, our explainer on what stablecoins are covers how USDT and USDC hold their peg and what can break it. The practical steps of buying through peer-to-peer (P2P) markets and mobile money are in the guide linked in the section on rules below.
Nigeria and South Africa lead the Chainalysis adoption index
The Chainalysis index does not count how many people own crypto. It scores each country on four measures: value received by exchanges and DeFi platforms, transfers between personal wallets inside the country, transfers across borders, and wallet balances. Each is weighted for purchasing power, scaled from 0 to 1, and the overall score is the geometric mean of the four, which rewards countries that do well on all of them. The firm calls its figures a conservative lower bound.
Nigeria: first for peer-to-peer and cross-border flows
Nigeria was sixth among 151 countries in the 2025 index published on 2 September 2025, and third among 117 countries in the 2026 edition, which covers July 2025 to June 2026. The detail is telling. Nigeria ranks first in the world on the P2P sub-index and first on cross-border flows, but only 18th on total flows and 18th on balances. In plain terms, Nigerians move a great deal of crypto between each other and across borders, and keep relatively little sitting in wallets.
In value, Nigeria received more than $92.1 billion on chain between July 2024 and June 2025, roughly three times South Africa, the next country in the region. Out of a regional total above $205 billion, up about 52% on the year before, Sub-Saharan Africa was the third-fastest growing region in the world in that period, behind Asia-Pacific and Latin America. On Nigerian centralised exchanges, bitcoin made up 89% of purchases made with local currency, against 51% in the group of countries buying with US dollars; USDT accounted for 7%, against 5% in that dollar group.
South Africa, Ethiopia, Kenya and Ghana
South Africa is the other African name on the global list: outside the top 20 in 2025, ninth in 2026. Its profile differs from Nigeria’s. It ranks fourth on P2P and third on cross-border flows, but 33rd on total flows and 16th on balances. Chainalysis describes a more institutional market built on an “advanced regulatory framework”, with hundreds of registered service providers, and mentions that Absa Bank is developing institutional crypto products. Bitcoin made up 74% of purchases with rand on centralised exchanges.
Ethiopia was 12th in the 2025 index and is not in the 2026 top 20. Kenya and Ghana are in neither top 20. In the 2025 regional analysis, Chainalysis names Ethiopia, Kenya and Ghana as the countries that “round out the top five” of Sub-Saharan Africa by value received, after Nigeria and South Africa, without ranking the three among themselves. Any claim that Kenya is a top global adopter is not supported by the index.
| Country | 2025 index (151 countries, 2 Sept 2025) | 2026 index (117 countries, 23 Sept 2026) | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| Nigeria | 6th | 3rd | 1st on P2P and on cross-border flows in 2026 |
| South Africa | Not in top 20 | 9th | 4th on P2P, 3rd on cross-border flows in 2026 |
| Ethiopia | 12th | Not in top 20 | In the region’s top five by value received, July 2024 to June 2025 |
| Kenya | Not in top 20 | Not in top 20 | In the region’s top five by value received, July 2024 to June 2025 |
| Ghana | Not in top 20 | Not in top 20 | In the region’s top five by value received, July 2024 to June 2025 |
What the index cannot see
The shares of bitcoin and stablecoins quoted above come from centralised exchange data only. Chainalysis says they exclude informal, business-to-business and over-the-counter trades, which are large in Africa: P2P desks on messaging apps, traders who settle in cash, firms that pay suppliers in USDT. The rank also depends on the measure. Nigeria is third overall and 18th on total flows in the same report. Read the index as a sign of where activity grows, not as a census of users.
Bitcoin in the Central African Republic: eleven months from law to repeal
The Central African Republic (CAR) is the only African state that tried to give bitcoin an official monetary role. Law n°22.004 of 22 April 2022 on cryptocurrency, whose text was published by Digital Business Africa, states in article 1 that bitcoin is to be treated as a “monnaie de référence” (reference currency). Article 10 obliges every economic agent to accept cryptocurrencies as payment when they are offered for a good or a service. Article 9 keeps the legal currency, the CFA franc, as the reference for accounting. The media summed it up as “legal tender”, which is close to the effect but not the law’s own wording.
The presidency announced the move on 27 April 2022. News reports at the time, Bloomberg’s among them, described the CAR as the second country after El Salvador to make bitcoin legal tender, and it was the first to try it inside a monetary union. The CAR uses the Central African CFA franc, issued by the Bank of Central African States (BEAC) for six countries.
The BEAC objected at once. In a letter dated 29 April 2022 to the CAR’s finance minister, reported by Voice of America, the governor said the law breached the bank’s rules, could affect monetary stability in the region and could compete with the CFA franc, and asked the government to annul it. In a statement emailed to Bloomberg and reported by Coin Bureau on 4 May 2022, the International Monetary Fund said the adoption “raises major legal, transparency, and economic policy challenges”. The BEAC, according to the same report, learned of the law at the same time as the public.
The Sango project and the court ruling
President Faustin-Archange Touadéra launched Sango Coin, a national token, on 3 July 2022, and sales opened on 25 July. The project aimed to raise nearly $1 billion, according to Cointelegraph, with citizenship, e-residency and land on offer for crypto. The Constitutional Court stopped the most contested parts at the end of August 2022: according to ITWeb Africa (31 August 2022), it ruled that selling Central African nationality was unconstitutional and also struck down the e-residency programme and land sales paid in crypto. The ruling could not be appealed.
Demand was thin. As of 29 August 2022, about 7.5% of the 210 million Sango Coins on offer had been sold, raising about $1.5 million against a first-phase target of $21 million, ITWeb reported. On 20 December 2022 Cointelegraph reported that the government had postponed listing the token on exchanges, citing market conditions, and that the project’s site showed $1.66 million sold. No verified data shows bitcoin being used for everyday payments in the CAR during this period.
The repeal of March 2023
On 23 March 2023 the CAR’s parliament unanimously adopted a law amending the April 2022 statute and removing the legal tender status of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, Central Banking reported on 27 March 2023. The trade publication described it as a concession to the country’s partners in the Central African Economic and Monetary Community (CEMAC). From promulgation to repeal, the episode lasted eleven months.
The CEMAC zone (Cameroon, Gabon, Congo, Chad, the Central African Republic and Equatorial Guinea) is covered in detail in our lesson on crypto in Cameroon and the CEMAC zone: the roles of the BEAC, the banking supervisor COBAC and the market regulator COSUMAF, what the regional texts say about crypto service providers, and how taxes and exchange controls apply.
West Africa has a twin system. The eight UEMOA states share the West African CFA franc, issued by the BCEAO, and their crypto rules, warnings and tax treatment, with Senegal and Côte d’Ivoire as the main cases, are in our lesson on crypto in Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire and the UEMOA zone.
The eNaira: Africa’s first central bank digital currency
Nigeria went the other way. Instead of adopting someone else’s cryptocurrency, the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) issued its own digital naira. President Muhammadu Buhari launched the eNaira on 25 October 2021, making Nigeria the first African country to roll out a central bank digital currency (CBDC). Unlike bitcoin, the eNaira is issued by the central bank itself and is worth exactly one naira.
Use stayed low. In a working paper published on 16 May 2023, Nigeria’s eNaira, One Year After, IMF staff found that adoption had not moved beyond a first, limited wave and pointed to weak network effects: a payment tool is useful only when the people you pay also use it. BusinessDay later reported that the IMF had disclosed in May 2023 that 98.5% of eNaira wallets were inactive.
Later figures confirm the pattern. BusinessDay reported on 10 May 2024, citing the IMF’s 2024 Article IV report on Nigeria, that the eNaira had processed 854,512 transactions since launch, mostly from consumers to merchants, worth a combined N29.3 billion. About 13 million wallets had been created, most of them inactive. For scale, Nigeria’s electronic payments reached N611.06 trillion in 2023. The CBN put the eNaira in circulation at N9.78 billion in August 2023 and N13.98 billion at the end of 2023. Wallet counts quoted by officials have varied widely over the years, so treat any single adoption number with care.
The CBN has not abandoned the project. On 1 June 2026 it presented its Payments System Vision 2028, a three-year plan for the country’s payment system. According to WeeTracker’s reading of the plan (9 June 2026), the bank admits slow uptake and cites “limited stakeholder engagement and buy-in” during design and rollout, and moves the eNaira from a consumer wallet to back-end infrastructure: government-to-person payments such as welfare transfers, and cross-border settlement. Whether that works will show in the numbers the CBN publishes next.
A private alternative appeared alongside. cNGN is a naira stablecoin issued by Wrapped CBDC Ltd and backed one-for-one by naira held in Nigerian banks and short-term instruments, according to its issuer. It is not a licensed product: as of October 2026 its issuer is reported to hold a conditional approval-in-principle in the Accelerated Regulatory Incubation Programme of Nigeria’s Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), a sandbox stage the regulator itself says is not a final licence.
Crypto rules in Nigeria, Kenya and South Africa, in short
Our guide to buying crypto in Africa already summarises the rules country by country, with the P2P and mobile money buying steps. The reminder below adds only what changed in 2025 and 2026 and what we could confirm.
In Nigeria, the Investments and Securities Act 2025 replaced the 2007 law. According to ICIR (29 March 2025), the SEC announced its signing that day; the act recognises virtual and digital assets as securities and brings virtual asset service providers, digital asset operators and exchanges under the SEC. The SEC admits firms in stages through its incubation programmes; an approval-in-principle there is conditional, not a full licence.
In Kenya, the Virtual Asset Service Providers Act 2025 (Act No. 20 of 2025) received presidential assent on 15 October 2025 and came into force on 4 November 2025. It splits supervision by activity between the Central Bank of Kenya (CBK) and the Capital Markets Authority (CMA). Licensing waited for the implementing regulations, which the Treasury gazetted on 22 July 2026 as Legal Notice No. 134, according to a summary published by Afriwise. They cover firms that target Kenyan customers even without an office in the country, and they bar stablecoin issuers from paying interest or rewards for holding their tokens. The transition period for firms already operating ends on 4 November 2026, after which a CBK or CMA licence is required, as Digital Policy Alert notes; see our page on the Kenya VASP licence deadline.
In South Africa, the Financial Sector Conduct Authority (FSCA) declared crypto assets a financial product under the FAIS Act in General Notice 1350, dated 19 October 2022, as Cliffe Dekker Hofmeyr explained the next day. Providers already in business then had a window, which opened on 1 June 2023, to apply for a licence. By 12 December 2025 the FSCA had received 512 applications, approved 300, declined 14 and seen 121 withdrawn, according to its update reported by Moonstone. A licence covers advice, intermediary services and investment management involving crypto assets; it does not make crypto legal tender.
Ghana is moving in the same direction: the Bank of Ghana registers virtual asset service providers and the SEC Ghana runs a digital assets sandbox, as Yellow Card’s own registration page shows.
For readers in the United States or the United Kingdom, an African platform does not change the home rules. A US person who buys stablecoins through a Lagos or Nairobi app, or sends them to relatives, still reports gains and disposals to the IRS, as our guide to crypto taxes in the United States explains. UK residents stay under HMRC rules, set out in our guide to crypto taxes in the United Kingdom, and crypto firms doing business in the UK must register with the FCA.
Mobile money is where crypto meets everyday payments in Africa
Mobile money is the payment system most Africans actually use, and M-Pesa is its best-known name. Safaricom’s results for the year to 31 March 2026, reported by HapaKenya, show 43.69 million active M-Pesa users at group level, up 18% from 37.03 million a year earlier. M-Pesa brought in KSh 182.73 billion of revenue in Kenya, 45.6% of Safaricom’s Kenyan service revenue. In Ethiopia, M-Pesa had 5.2 million 90-day customers.
M-Pesa’s first move toward blockchain came in January 2026. Business Day reported on 13 January 2026 that M-Pesa, the platform of Vodacom and Safaricom, had signed a partnership with ADI Foundation, a technology venture based in Abu Dhabi, which, citing Semafor, it said aims to bring ADI’s blockchain technology to millions of Africans. The paper put M-Pesa’s customer base at 60 million. No stablecoin and no launch date were named. The same article says, without naming a source, that M-Pesa handled more than 90% of remittances to Kenya in the 2024 fiscal year.
The links that work today sit behind the screen. Onafriq, a payments network whose APIs connect M-Pesa, Airtel Money and Orange Money wallets, said at the Africa Fintech Summit in February 2026 that it would work with Conduit, a US cross-border payments platform, to bring payments in through USDC and manage its treasury in stablecoins. When Ecofin reviewed it on 2 July 2026, no go-live date had been given. Ecofin also checked a rumour of a joint stablecoin pilot in Congo and found none: “there is no single, jointly announced stablecoin pilot uniting Visa, M-Pesa and Onafriq”. What did launch, in September 2025, was Visa Pay with Onafriq in the DRC, which lets users fund Visa wallets from mobile money, without stablecoins.
The Democratic Republic of Congo shows the tension. The GSMA projected Congolese mobile payments at $3.85 billion of transaction value for 2025. The central bank governor, André Wameso, in office since August 2025, has lamented that close to 80% of transactions in the country are in foreign currency, Ecofin reported, citing Financial Afrik. Dollar stablecoins carried over mobile money can make it easier to hold dollars, which is exactly what a central bank fighting dollarisation does not want. The same argument explains much of the caution of the BEAC, the BCEAO and the CBN.
Yellow Card, Bitnob and Kotani Pay: the companies building the ramps
An on-ramp turns local money into crypto; an off-ramp does the reverse. In Africa the hard part is the local leg: bank partners, mobile money integrations, compliance in each country. Yellow Card, Bitnob and Kotani Pay are at different stages of that work.
Yellow Card: licensed in some countries, registered in others
Yellow Card launched in Nigeria in 2019, according to the company’s own funding announcement of October 2024, and started as a retail app for buying stablecoins and bitcoin. In October 2024 it raised a $33 million Series C led by Blockchain Capital, with Polychain Capital, Block, Galaxy Ventures and Winklevoss Capital among the investors; the company put its completed equity financing at $85 million, according to The Block (17 October 2024). The money was earmarked for the APIs and widgets that, the company said, let international firms such as Coinbase and Block reach African customers. Visa signed a stablecoin exploration agreement with Yellow Card in June 2025, according to Ecofin.
Its licence and registration page shows how uneven the rules still are. Most entries are anti-money-laundering registrations, not licences:
| Country | Regulator | Status | Date |
|---|---|---|---|
| Botswana | NBFIRA | Virtual asset service provider licence | 29 September 2022 |
| South Africa | FSCA | Category I financial services provider, crypto assets (FSP 53790) | Not stated |
| South Africa | Under Standard Bank and Nedbank sponsorship | Third-party payments provider authorisations | 22 January and 30 March 2026 |
| Ghana | Bank of Ghana; SEC Ghana | VASP registration; digital assets sandbox | August 2025; 8 April 2026 |
| Zambia | Bank of Zambia | VASP registration | March 2026 |
| Nigeria | SEC Nigeria | Conditional approval-in-principle (incubation programme) | 14 August 2026 |
| Tanzania | Bank of Tanzania | Sandbox application pending | Pending |
Bitnob: from a bitcoin app to payment infrastructure
Bitnob began in 2021 as a consumer bitcoin app and launched Bitnob Business in 2022. In June 2026 it added Bitnob Enterprise, a non-custodial infrastructure stack for organisations and developers that want to manage custody, keys and treasury themselves, and extended off-ramp coverage to more than 110 countries, according to ThisDay. The company says more than $4.5 billion has moved through its infrastructure; that figure is its own and has not been independently audited. Its founder and CEO is Bernard Parah. The launch material names no licences and no recent funding round, and we found no verifiable source for a later round.
Kotani Pay: Tether money for a Kenyan ramp
Kotani Pay is a Kenya-based company that runs on-ramp and off-ramp services between stablecoins and local payment channels across Africa. On 21 October 2025 Tether, the issuer of USDT, announced a strategic investment in it, as reported by Citizen Digital; the amount was not disclosed. Its licence status under Kenya’s new VASP regime was not public as of October 2026, and like every operator in the country it faces the 4 November 2026 deadline.
Beyond payments: land, health and identity projects in Africa
Blockchain projects in Africa that have nothing to do with money exist, but few left the pilot stage. Our lesson on blockchain land registries checks what really happened in Ghana and Rwanda, two countries often cited for land titles; this lesson found no African blockchain land registry running in production that we could verify. For medicines, our lesson on blockchain in healthcare explains why tracking drug packs is where a ledger can help and where it cannot. Identity papers and diplomas are the subject of our lesson on blockchain for digital identity and diplomas, and the overview of blockchain use cases puts all these sectors side by side.
Risks for people using crypto in Africa
State policy can reverse quickly. The CAR passed a bitcoin law and undid it within a year; Kenya’s licensing deadline may push some platforms to stop serving Kenyans. A firm listed as registered with a financial intelligence unit is not licensed to hold your money, and a sandbox approval is not a licence.
P2P trading carries counterparty risk: the other side may not pay, or may pay with stolen funds, which can get a bank or mobile money account frozen. Dollar stablecoins protect against a falling local currency, but they depend on the issuer’s reserves, and converting back to naira, shillings or CFA francs can cost more than the transfer itself.
Fraud follows adoption. Fake investment platforms, “doubling” schemes sold on messaging apps and impersonated exchange agents are common; our guide on how to avoid crypto scams lists the warning signs. Nothing in this lesson is a recommendation to buy any asset.
Dates to watch to the end of 2026
On 4 November 2026 Kenya’s transition period ends and unlicensed virtual asset services become illegal there. In Nigeria, the firms admitted to the SEC’s incubation programmes, Yellow Card and the cNGN issuer among them, are waiting to see whether conditional approvals turn into licences. The Africa Stablecoin Summit takes place in Cape Town on 12 and 13 November 2026. And the CBN has yet to publish eNaira figures that would show whether the move to government payments is working.
