Sub-Saharan Africa processed over $205 billion in on-chain value between July 2024 and June 2025. That is a 52% year-over-year increase. The money is moving. The question governments are now scrambling to answer is: under whose rules?
For most of the last decade, the dominant regulatory posture toward crypto was reactive — governments moved when something broke, when a exchange collapsed, when a Ponzi scheme dressed in blockchain language wiped out retail investors. The frameworks that emerged from that posture were, predictably, punitive and incomplete. They addressed the symptom. They did not address the underlying question of how digital assets fit into a functioning financial architecture.
That posture is shifting. Not everywhere, and not uniformly — but the shift is real, and the implications for Africa are specific enough to warrant a serious argument.
Regulation as Infrastructure, Not Interference
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission established a dedicated Crypto Task Force with a stated mandate to provide clarity on how federal securities laws apply to the crypto asset market and to recommend policy measures that balance investor protection with conditions for innovation. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission went further in operational terms: it announced the first-ever listed spot crypto trading on U.S. regulated exchanges — a structural integration of digital assets into the formal financial system, not a grudging acknowledgment of their existence.
These are not symbolic gestures. When the CFTC brings spot crypto onto regulated exchanges, it changes the risk profile for institutional capital. It changes what pension funds can hold, what custodians can offer, what compliance officers can approve. The downstream effect is a legitimisation that flows outward — including to markets that take regulatory cues from Washington, which includes most of Africa's central banks, whether they would admit it or not.
The counterargument is that U.S. regulatory clarity primarily benefits U.S. actors, and that African markets will simply inherit frameworks designed for a different economic context. That argument has merit, which is precisely why what Nigeria did matters.
Nigeria's Executive Order and the Harmonisation Problem
Nigeria signed an executive order to unify crypto regulations and established a council to harmonise oversight of digital assets across its regulatory bodies. This is not a small administrative move. Nigeria's crypto market is one of the most active on the continent, and it has historically been governed — if that word applies — by a patchwork of conflicting signals from the Central Bank of Nigeria, the Securities and Exchange Commission Nigeria, and the Federal Inland Revenue Service, each applying different interpretations of what crypto is and therefore what rules govern it.
The harmonisation problem is structural. When a technology does not fit cleanly into existing asset categories, different regulators classify it differently, and the gap between those classifications becomes a compliance burden that only well-resourced actors can navigate. Smaller builders, individual developers, early-stage fintech companies — they cannot afford the legal overhead of operating under three simultaneous and contradictory frameworks. The executive order is an attempt to close that gap. Its success will depend on implementation, which is a longer story, but the intent is correct.
The Central African Republic took a different approach entirely. It launched Sango Coin, a national cryptocurrency designed to tokenize the country's natural resources for global investors. The ambition is legible: attract foreign capital without going through the traditional gatekeepers of sovereign debt and multilateral lending. Whether the execution delivers on that ambition is a separate question — and under current conditions, the evidence is thin. But the underlying logic, that a government can use blockchain infrastructure to restructure how it interfaces with global capital markets, is not fanciful. It is a genuine frontier.
What Governance Actually Requires
The honest version of the crypto governance argument is not about whether governments should regulate digital assets. They will. The question is whether the frameworks they build will be legible to the people actually using these systems — the traders in Lagos, the remittance recipients in Kampala, the small businesses in Accra using stablecoins to hedge against currency volatility because their local currency offers them no better option.
Governance frameworks that are written primarily to satisfy institutional compliance requirements, without accounting for the informal and semi-formal economic activity that drives the bulk of on-chain volume in Africa, will produce the same outcome as every previous wave of financial regulation on the continent: a formal system that works for large actors and a grey market that absorbs everyone else.
The $205 billion figure is instructive here. That volume did not accumulate because Africans were waiting for regulatory permission. It accumulated because the tools solved real problems that the formal financial system had declined to solve — cross-border payments that take days and cost a percentage point, identity verification that excludes people without formal documentation, savings instruments that do not erode at the rate of local inflation. The regulation that comes next will either accommodate that reality or it will criminalise it. There is no neutral third option.
The Identity Layer Underneath
There is a specific technical problem that sits beneath most of the governance challenges described above, and it is rarely named directly: identity. Blockchain transactions are pseudonymous by design. Regulatory compliance — KYC, AML, sanctions screening — requires identity verification. The gap between those two facts is where most crypto governance frameworks get stuck, and where most of the compliance cost accumulates.
Solving that gap does not require choosing between privacy and compliance. It requires building identity infrastructure that can interface with both the formal requirements of regulated systems and the practical constraints of users who may not have government-issued documentation that a Western compliance framework would recognise. That is a technical and institutional problem. It is also, specifically, an African problem — because the share of the population that falls outside conventional identity infrastructure is highest here.
The builders working on that problem are not waiting for Washington or Lagos to finish writing the rules. They are building the rails that will make whatever rules emerge actually functional. That is the work Mydappr is in — not adjacent to the governance conversation, but structurally necessary to it. The digital infrastructure that makes crypto governance workable in Africa is not a downstream product of regulation. It is a precondition for it.
