Binance Nigeria is in dire straits as the Federal Government slammed a $10 billion fine on the crypto currency trading platform.
Bayo Onanuga, the Special Adviser on Information and Strategy to President Bola Tinubu, confirmed this to the BBC Friday morning.
Binance is an online exchange where users can trade cryptocurrencies.
Nigeria is one of the largest peer-to-peer crypto markets in the world.
Between July 2022 and June 2023, crypto transactions in the country reached $56.7 billion, according to Chainalysis.
However, an insider in Binance confirmed to Peoples Gazette that the company has no intention to pay the fine.
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Onanuga said the substantial fine is imposed due to Binance’s illicit activities, significantly contributing to the devaluation of Nigeria’s currency, the naira, in recent times.
He stated that the platform sets an unauthorized exchange rate for the country, a prerogative exclusively held by the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN).
Onanuga emphasised that the actions of Binance, including harboring individuals responsible for manipulating exchange rates, have a swift and adverse impact on Nigeria’s economy during its efforts to stabilize.
While acknowledging Binance’s cooperation with the government by providing information, the Presidential aide expressed concerns about the platform’s potential to destabilize the Nigerian economy if left unchecked.
The President Bola Tinubu-led government has been intensifying efforts to curtail Binance’s operations within the country, leading to Binance’s removal of the naira from its peer-to-peer feature, known as the P2P market.
This feature enables users to transact without intermediary involvement.
The presidential aide further urged Nigerians to stop patronising the parallel market for FX rates, saying the website of the apex bank was the only legal platform.
“The parallel market is not the real gauge of Nigeria’s economic health. The parallel market is an illegal market.
“I don’t even know why Nigerians and the media are feeding on the parallel market. That is not where we should go; what’s the CBN rate? As at Friday, the rate for the dollar was about N1600.
“Even in the so-called parallel market, the exchange rate is stabilizing there and that is what this needs. Our economy is too much dollarised. Importers are looking at the exchange rate and using it to fix prices, some of them arbitrarily, some of them actually profiteering,” Onanuga stated.
According to him, once the CBN succeeds in stabilising the exchange rate, the prices of goods in the country will normalise. “Things are not going to get worse, they are going to get better in the next few weeks,” he noted.
Crackdown on Binance
Recall that few days ago, Office of the National Security Adviser said the Federal Government was investigating the operations of Binance.
As part of the government’s crackdown, the office of the National Security Adviser, Nuhu Ribadu, in Abuja arrested and detained two Binance employees who flew into the country.
Financial Times had on Wednesday reported that passports of two executives of the company were equally seized by the Nigerian government.
The government’s actions aim to curb naira speculation and address the declining value of the currency by taking decisive measures against cryptocurrency exchanges.
During a recent Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) meeting of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), Governor Olayemi Cardoso stated that an astounding $26 billion had passed through Binance Nigeria from unidentified sources and users within a year.
The CBN boss expressed concerns about suspicious financial flows and illicit activities associated with cryptocurrency entities like Binance.
