Nigeria launches unified crypto oversight council

TLDR

Nigeria has created a coordinated Virtual Asset Council to unify how its regulators oversee crypto and other digital assets.

1. The new Virtual Asset Council centralizes policy coordination across the central bank, securities regulator, tax authority and security agencies.
2. The order moves Nigeria from fragmented rules and informal bans toward formal registration, AML oversight, sandboxes and sector-specific tax policy.
3. Over the next 30 days, implementation details, sandbox rules and the coming white paper will determine how friendly the environment is for exchanges and crypto users.

Deep Dive

1. What Has Been Created

President Bola Tinubu signed the Presidential Executive Order on Virtual Assets Coordination, 2026, which takes effect immediately and establishes a national Virtual Asset Council for crypto oversight.

The council is chaired by the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), with the Revenue Service and Securities and Exchange Commission as vice chairs, and includes the Financial Intelligence Unit and National Security Adviser, creating a single interagency hub for virtual asset policy and supervision. A new Virtual Asset Office inside the CBN will run day-to-day coordination and data sharing using an integrated supervisory platform, according to a detailed community report on the order.

Confidence: high, based on the published executive order summary and regulator lineup.

2. How It Changes Nigerias Crypto Environment

The order explicitly aims to fix a fragmented environment where agencies worked in silos, allowing unregistered operators and fraud to flourish, and instead to harmonize oversight of securities-like tokens, payments, custody and tax treatment.

Existing regulators keep their powers: the SEC handles security tokens and related registrations, while the CBN supervises payments, settlements and custody for non-security assets. The Revenue Service is tasked with a dedicated tax policy for virtual assets, and the council will resolve grey areas when jurisdiction is unclear, as described in the executive-order analysis on CoinsKid.

Nigeria already ranks among the worlds largest crypto user bases, with more than $92.1 billion in on-chain value in one recent 12-month period and tens of millions of users, making regulatory clarity especially significant for local exchanges and fintechs.

3. What To Watch Next

The Virtual Asset Council has 30 days to deliver a harmonized implementation framework, which will spell out licensing processes, reporting standards and how aggressively unregistered platforms will be targeted.

The CBN is preparing a regulatory sandbox for exchanges and startups, and the government is finalizing a broader Virtual Assets White Paper that will set longer term strategy for the sector. How these are written and enforced will determine whether Nigeria becomes a model for African digital asset regulation or a high-friction market that smaller operators struggle to enter.

Conclusion

Nigerias unified crypto oversight council marks a pivot from patchwork rules and episodic crackdowns toward coordinated, rule-based supervision of digital assets.

For crypto users and builders, the headline risk is tighter scrutiny, but the longer term upside is a clearer, more predictable environment in a country that is already a major crypto market. Watching the 30-day framework, sandbox criteria and tax rules will be key to understanding how investable and scalable Nigerias crypto ecosystem becomes.