Nigeria nearly traded $400 million worth of bitcoin (BTC) in the first half of 2022, according to the most recent data from peer-to-peer cryptocurrency exchange platform, Paxful. Together with the $760 million in trading volumes projected in 2021, this makes the West African country Paxful’s most significant market globally.

According to Paxful, the rise in P2P volumes in Africa was caused by a widespread lack of access to financial institutions on the continent, which led many to turn to bitcoin. 

The Paxful team reported, “For a market like Africa, where many people are underbanked and financial institutions are not as easily accessible, P2P finance provides an opportunity for financial inclusion. There’s been an explosion in Bitcoin adoption in Nigeria due to a multitude of factors: a 33% unemployment rate, an unbanked population of 38 million adults, a young and entrepreneurial community (over 75% of its population is under 35), and financial instability such as volatility around the Naira.”

The P2P exchange added that all these factors make a massive case for bitcoin, a technology that it said was built for the masses.

Meanwhile, other countries like Kenya and Ghana were other sources of high Bitcoin P2P trade volumes for the exchange. According to data shared by Paxful, Kenya saw P2P volumes of over $200 million in 2021 and registered a volume of $125 million in the first half of 2022. 

Kenya was the second-largest market in Africa after Nigeria and fifth in the world. The exchange anticipates that the trade volume in Kenya will grow by 25% in 2022.

Paxful stated, “There are more and more African users remitting money over the years, the total remittance user base (users trading in multiple currencies) on Paxful grew by nearly 140% in Kenya and over 115% in Ghana in 2021. In 2021, Ghana experienced a yearly growth of 95% in trade volume.”

Nigeria’s growing volume of bitcoin traded via the peer-to-peer (P2P) exchange comes when regulators are clamping down on financial institutions violating the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN)’s February 5, 2021 directive. The directive bars banks and other regulated financial institutions from facilitating transactions that involve crypto entities.

Regarding the Central African Republic, Paxful said that while the country became the first to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender in Africa, it has not achieved anything notable regarding setting monetary policies for digital assets. According to Paxful, the country’s trade volumes are still unremarkable.