Ask most Nigerian parents what MMM was, and they will tell you in detail, sometimes with names attached. They understand risk. They have lived through more of it than most twenty-five-year-olds have.
Most people assume the danger is a fake website. In practice, some of the worst breaches have happened on real, trusted sites. The technique is called formjacking, and it belongs to a family of attacks known collectively as Magecart...
What is new is who gets paid. With Circle's USDC or Tether's USDT, the issuer keeps the interest earned on the reserves. That interest income is a large part of how both companies make money.
Bitcoin's price has increasingly tracked the same forces that move tech stocks and other risk assets: how much cheap money is sloshing around the financial system, how nervous or confident investors feel about the broader economy, and what central banks are doing with interest rates.
Impersonation scams surged incredibly and grew more than 1400% compared to the previous year. Fraudsters are posing as government agencies, toll collection services, and customer support representatives to manipulate users into handing over access to their funds.
A taxable person who fails to file returns faces an administrative penalty of ₦100,000 in the first month and ₦50,000 for each subsequent month the failure continues.
In February 2021, the Central Bank of Nigeria ordered banks to close any account linked to cryptocurrency. The move was meant to curb money laundering and consumer risk. Instead, it pushed an entire market underground.
The best time to mention your payment method is before the client has a chance to assume one. Waiting until after the work is delivered puts you in a weak position, because now you are asking them to change a plan they already had in their head.
None of this rules out tap-to-pay in Nigeria. It simply means the country is earlier on the adoption curve than South Africa or Morocco, with infrastructure catching up piece by piece.
If you save $100 and it earns 5% in a year, you end up with $105. In the second year, that 5% applies to $105, not the original $100, so you earn a little more than before. Repeat that every month or every year, and the growth curve stops being a straight line. It bends upward.
It was not that Tunde had no money. He had spent two months earning USDT from clients in Europe, and that money sat untouched in a crypto wallet while he stood in a foreign airport unable to buy a cup of coffee. His naira account back home was tied to a quarterly travel allowance.
The saying "not your keys, not your coins" is practically gospel. But what that philosophy does not account for is what happens when the key holder is gone.