Why Your Parents Don't Trust Crypto (And Why They're Not Entirely Wrong)

My cousin told his mother he was moving some of his savings into stablecoins. She asked him if this was the same thing as the Yahoo Boys business. He said no, tried to explain what a stablecoin was, gave up halfway through, and changed the subject.

This scene has played out in some form in almost every Nigerian household with a phone and a data plan. A young person brings up crypto. A parent's face changes. The conversation ends before it starts.

The easy explanation is that they don't understand it. That's not quite true. 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. This is about what they are actually afraid of, and why some of that fear is earned.

What They've Already Lived Through

Start with MMM. In 2016, close to three million Nigerians put money into a scheme that promised 30% monthly returns. It collapsed in December that year. Estimates of what was lost run into the hundreds of billions of naira. Almost every Nigerian family has someone in it who was touched by that collapse, whether directly or through a relative who had to be helped afterward.

Then there's the memory of a bank freeze. The 2023 naira redesign left people queuing outside banks for cash that didn't come, watching account balances they couldn't touch. For a generation that already distrusts anything digital sitting between them and their money, that memory sits close to the surface.

And there's the news itself. Crypto exchange collapses, exit scams, a nephew who put his NYSC allowance into a coin someone recommended on WhatsApp and never saw it again. These stories travel faster and further than the quieter ones about people who used crypto sensibly, and nothing dramatic happened to them, because nothing dramatic happening does not make for a story anyone tells at a family gathering.

So when a parent hears the word crypto, they are not hearing a technology. They are hearing MMM with better marketing. Given what they've seen, that is not an unreasonable place to land.

Where They're Right

Some of it holds up. Crypto has genuinely been used to scam people. Fake platforms have promised guaranteed returns and disappeared with the money. Impersonators have posed as agents, as support staff, as government officials, and taken advantage of people who had no way of telling the difference. None of this is exaggerated. It happens often enough that caution around it is simply informed behavior, not stubbornness.

There is also the volatility itself. A parent who watched their child's portfolio lose 40% of its value in a bad month is not going to be reassured by a chart showing it recovered eighteen months later. They are thinking about the eighteen months in between, and about what happens if the money was needed during that stretch.

None of this is a strawman. It is worth saying plainly, because a lot of writing aimed at this exact skepticism tries to talk parents out of a fear that has real grounding. That approach rarely works, and it shouldn't, because the fear is often correct about the thing it is pointed at.

What it gets wrong, however, is the size of the category it's applied to. A Ponzi scheme promising 30% monthly is not the same category of thing as a freelancer receiving payment in a dollar-backed digital currency because their client is in London and the bank transfer would take four days and eat 8% in fees. One is a bet dressed up as an investment. The other is a rail for money to move on, closer in spirit to a bank transfer than to a lottery ticket.

Mobile money went through a similar arc. When it first appeared, older relatives were suspicious of it too. Money that lived on a phone, with no queue, no bank hall, no physical proof it existed. It took years of everyday use before it stopped feeling risky and started feeling normal. Nobody's parents question a Moniepoint transaction today. They question it constantly when it's crypto, mostly because crypto's most visible stories have been about token prices swinging wildly, while its quietest and most common use, moving stable value across borders, rarely makes the news.

The distrust is aimed at the whole category. The risky part of that category is real. The useful part is just less loud.

What The Useful Part Actually Looks Like

It looks like a freelancer in Lagos getting paid by a client in Toronto without waiting three business days for a wire to clear. It looks like a family receiving money from a relative abroad without a middleman taking a cut that would have covered a week of groceries. It looks like someone converting naira into a dollar-backed balance the week before a bad devaluation headline, not to speculate, but to keep the value of money they already earned.

None of this needs explaining through charts or block times. It needs one sentence a parent can hold onto: it does the same job a bank does, faster and cheaper, for people the banking system was never built to move money quickly for.

How To Not Become The Story Your Parents Warned You About

If the goal is to prove them wrong, the fastest way is to not give them a reason to be right.

Use apps that are licensed and have a real support line, not a platform someone found through a Telegram link. Never share a PIN, a password, or a one-time code with anyone, including someone claiming to be support staff. Treat any offer of guaranteed returns as a closed conversation, because nothing that moves value honestly needs to promise a fixed percentage every month to get your attention.

These are not crypto-specific rules. They are the same rules that apply to any account holding money that matters to you. The difference is that crypto has fewer institutional guardrails standing between a careless decision and its consequences, which means the caution has to come from you instead.

The Actual Point

Your parents are not wrong to be careful. They watched a scheme collapse and take neighbors' savings with it. They watched a currency policy lock people out of their own accounts. Caution, in that context, is not closed-mindedness. It's pattern recognition, built the hard way.

What they haven't seen yet is the version of this that actually works quietly in the background, the one that doesn't make headlines because nothing went wrong. That version is harder to explain in a five-minute conversation.

It's much easier to show them. Send a payment home and let them see it land in minutes. Let the usefulness make the argument the explanation never could.