Nigeria is trying to make the main monetary free zone for bitcoin and digital currencies in West Africa through the Nigeria Export Processing Zones Authority (NEPZA).
NEPZA is in serious discussion with Binance, one of the main digital currency trading companies in the crypto market, as well as Talent City which has some expertise in building unique monetary or economic zones.
“Our goal is to engender a flourishing virtual free zones to take advantage of a near trillion dollar virtual economy in blockchains and digital economy,” said Adesoji Adesugba, NEPZA’s managing director.”
Moreover, NEPZA revealed that if an agreement is reached, the eventual outcome would reflect that of the Dubai Virtual Free Zone.
As a matter of fact, this previous December, Binance went into a Memorandum of Understanding with the Dubai World Trade Center. The update plans to make Dubai a center point for bitcoin and cryptographic currency related products and services by making “another worldwide virtual resource environment.”
In February of last year, the Central Bank of Nigeria gave a letter restricting controlled commercial banks and other financial institutions from “dealing” with bitcoin or other cryptographic forms of money. Following the restriction, Nigeria saw an increase of 27% in distributed (P2P) bitcoin exchanges nationwide.
Dubai and Nigeria hope to lay out unique economic zones to benefit bitcoin and other digital forms of money, we can investigate existing monetary zones.
Last year Africa as a whole became the largest country in P2P transactions in the world by volume. Around the same time, Chainalysis reported a global adoption index which showed Nigeria in the top 10 countries worldwide for its adoption of bitcoin.
