Miguel Afonso Caetano on Nostr: "The US wasn’t the only country with Binance grievances. By early 2024, Nigeria, ...
"The US wasn’t the only country with Binance grievances. By early 2024, Nigeria, too, was casting blame on the company, not only for the past compliance violations it had confessed to in its US plea agreement, but also for allegedly contributing to the devaluation of Nigeria’s currency, the naira. Over late 2023 and early 2024, as the naira lost close to 70 percent of its value, Nigerians had rushed to trade their local currency for crypto, in particular blockchain-based “stablecoins” pegged to the US dollar.
The real cause of that disastrous sell-off was the decision by the administration of the new Nigerian president, Bola Tinubu, to relax restrictions on the exchange rate between the naira and the dollar, combined with the revelation that the Central Bank of Nigeria held a surprisingly small reserve of foreign currency, says Amaka Anku, an analyst and Africa head at business advisory Eurasia Group. Once the naira began to tumble, though, cryptocurrency’s role as an unregulated means to sell off naira created more downward pressure, she says. “You can’t say Binance or any crypto exchange caused this devaluation,” says Anku. “But they did exacerbate it.”
For years, cryptocurrency’s advocates had imagined a day when Satoshi’s invention would offer a safe haven for citizens of a country experiencing an inflation crisis. Now that day had come, and the government of the nation with the biggest economy on the African continent was furious. In December 2023, a committee in Nigeria’s National Assembly called upon Binance executives to attend a hearing in its capital, Abuja, to explain how it would right its alleged wrongs. And when Binance assembled its Nigerian delegation, it naturally tapped its star investigator and former federal agent, the symbol of its commitment to partnership with law enforcement and governments around the world: Tigran Gambaryan."
https://www.wired.com/story/untold-story-crypto-crimefighters-descent-nigerian-prison-binance/
#Crypto #Cryptocurrencies #Binance #Nigeria
The real cause of that disastrous sell-off was the decision by the administration of the new Nigerian president, Bola Tinubu, to relax restrictions on the exchange rate between the naira and the dollar, combined with the revelation that the Central Bank of Nigeria held a surprisingly small reserve of foreign currency, says Amaka Anku, an analyst and Africa head at business advisory Eurasia Group. Once the naira began to tumble, though, cryptocurrency’s role as an unregulated means to sell off naira created more downward pressure, she says. “You can’t say Binance or any crypto exchange caused this devaluation,” says Anku. “But they did exacerbate it.”
For years, cryptocurrency’s advocates had imagined a day when Satoshi’s invention would offer a safe haven for citizens of a country experiencing an inflation crisis. Now that day had come, and the government of the nation with the biggest economy on the African continent was furious. In December 2023, a committee in Nigeria’s National Assembly called upon Binance executives to attend a hearing in its capital, Abuja, to explain how it would right its alleged wrongs. And when Binance assembled its Nigerian delegation, it naturally tapped its star investigator and former federal agent, the symbol of its commitment to partnership with law enforcement and governments around the world: Tigran Gambaryan."
https://www.wired.com/story/untold-story-crypto-crimefighters-descent-nigerian-prison-binance/
#Crypto #Cryptocurrencies #Binance #Nigeria