Nigeria unifies crypto oversight with new order

TLDR

Nigeria has issued an executive order that centralizes and coordinates crypto oversight across its main financial regulators.

1. The order creates a Virtual Asset Council and Office to harmonize rules among the central bank, securities regulator, tax authority, and intelligence units.
2. Oversight is split: the Central Bank of Nigeria handles payments and custody for non?security crypto, while the SEC continues to regulate tokenized securities and investment products.
3. The council has 30 days to deliver an implementation framework, plus a broader white paper and tax policy that will shape how Nigerians can legally use and build with crypto.

Deep Dive

1. New Oversight Structure

President Bola Tinubu signed the Presidential Executive Order on Virtual Assets Coordination, 2026, which takes effect immediately and is designed to fix fragmented oversight that allowed scams and unregistered operators to flourish. The order establishes a Virtual Asset Council, chaired by the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) with the Nigeria Revenue Service and Securities and Exchange Commission as vice chairs, alongside the financial intelligence unit and national security adviser, creating a single forum for policy and supervision across agencies. A new Virtual Asset Office inside the CBN will coordinate applications, data sharing, and supervision through an integrated technology platform, according to the official summary of the Presidential Executive Order on Virtual Assets Coordination.

2. Impact On Users And Firms

The order does not create a brand new regulator or strip existing agencies of power, but it clarifies roles. The SEC keeps authority over virtual assets that are securities, while the CBN supervises payments, settlements, custody, and other services involving non?security crypto. The CBN will also run a regulatory sandbox where vetted projects can test products under supervision, and the tax authority will issue a dedicated crypto tax policy. For users and businesses, this means tighter expectations on registration, KYC, and reporting, but also clearer rules in a country where about 22 million people already use or hold crypto and on?chain value topped 92.1 billion dollars in one year.

3. Next Steps And Open Questions

The Virtual Asset Council must produce a Harmonised Implementation Framework within 30 days, and a wider Virtual Assets White Paper is close to completion, so the concrete rules should start emerging relatively quickly. Key open questions include how strict licensing will be for local and foreign exchanges, how aggressive the crackdown on unregistered platforms becomes, and how the new tax policy treats everyday trading versus long term holding. Given Nigerias scale as Africas leading crypto market, the way this framework is implemented could influence how other emerging markets design their own crypto rulebooks.

Conclusion

Nigerias new executive order turns a patchwork of overlapping crypto rules into a coordinated system, anchored by the central bank and securities regulator. For the market, the near term effect is more compliance overhead and likely pressure on unregistered operators, but the medium term upside is regulatory clarity that can support larger, more credible crypto businesses and products built for Nigerian users. Watching the first 30 to 90 days of implementation will show whether this shift becomes a genuine catalyst for responsible innovation or mainly a tightening of enforcement.