Sub-Saharan Africa has become the largest market for peer-to-peer Bitcoin trading, surpassing North America.
This may not come as a surprise as a recent survey by Binance ranks Nigeria as the number 1 country with the highest cryptocurrency adoption in the world.
Those are the results from UsefulTulips.org.
The site analyzes data from the LocalBitcoins and Paxful trading platforms.
In the last trading week, a total of $17,599,679 was traded in BTC volume from sub-Saharan Africa. For the North American region, $17,540,134 was traded in BTC volume.
With $8,761,051 in BTC traded, Nigeria led the sub-Saharan charge.
Kenya and Ghana were distant second and third with $3,613,004 and $2,882,710 in traded BTC volume.
For this period, the United States-led North American BTC volume with $16,752,803.
In terms of monthly averages for August, North America was marginally above sub-Saharan Africa.
A total of $73,529,843 has been traded in BTC volume from North America, while $73,420,672 has been traded in BTC volume from sub-Saharan Africa.
After the Nigerian Central Bank banned cryptocurrencies in February, P2P trading has flourished across the country.
Paxful had announced in April 2021 that trading volume from Nigeria had hit $1.5bn with 1.5 million users.
Nigerians traded $566 million worth of bitcoin between 2015 and 2020, second only to the United States in the peer-to-peer bitcoin market.
According to a source at Paxful, Nigerians traded over $225m in bitcoin between March and June 2021.
Paxful noted that only $180m of BTC were traded from Nov 2020 to Feb 2021.
According to Binance, mobile phone-based P2P payments have led to many Nigerians, especially the younger, more tech-savvy ones, exploring cryptocurrency.
Crypto does not seem to disappear any time soon, with approximately 300 million users as of 2021.
