At first, Seun Dania was skeptical about digital currencies. He had lost funds to E-Gold and Liberty Reserves, which previously offered digital currencies but were shut down by US authorities in 2013.

However, Dania, a Nigeria-born Certified Ethical Hacker, was approached by a firm to sort out a ransomware issue. Little did he know that this was the beginning of a cryptocurrency business.

“Never pay those ransom guys to get your files back,” Dania quips in an interview with Nodo News. “But there was a particular client who said they (files) were very important. He was a lawyer and he needed to get those files back. He had no backup.”

To pay the ransom, Dania was requested to get access to Bitcoin. Cryptocurrency is a popular way to pay off hackers.

After the incident, Dania saw increased demands from other people to intermediate the purchase of cryptocurrency for various reasons.

“There was a huge demand and people kept calling up asking for assistance to buy bitcoin,” he states. In 2015, he established his first exchange, 234Exchange, to meet the pent-up demand.

The Birth of Tradefada

His friends at the time were also engaged in cryptocurrency. Dania partnered with some of them to launch Tradefada in 2017 and became its CEO. The startup had over 1,000 users at its inception, Dania says.

Now, as Nigeria’s peer-to-peer crypto trading platforms witnesses massive growth, Tradefada has seen a resurgence in crypto adoption since the ban on banking cryptocurrency clients by the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN).

“Before the CBN directive, we were doing well over $3 million a day,” Dania says. The Feb. 5, 2021 directive almost collapsed the venture. Most cryptocurrency platforms could no longer bank proceeds on behalf of their clients. This birthed the peer-to-peer model.

According to Bitcoin.com, Nigeria’s growing volume of bitcoin traded via the peer-to-peer (P2P) exchange comes at a time when regulators are clamping down on financial institutions.

In the report, released in Aug. 2022, Paxful said: “There has been an explosion in bitcoin adoption in Nigeria due to a multitude of factors: a 33% unemployment rate, an unbanked population of 38 million adults, a young and entrepreneurial community (over 75% of its population is under 35), and financial instability — such as volatility around the naira.”

P2P is the Way

The P2P model has picked up since then and Dania says the exchange can process up to $1 million of transactions in one day.

In addition to Tradefada’s spot exchange, which boasts of 50 trading pairs with deep liquidity, the platform has about 400,000 users, compared to 250,000 users in 2021. It is now aiming to expand its tentacles to other African countries, he said.

“We have a partnership with MoonPay, which allows us to be able to off-ramp and on-ramp crypto in up to 54 different countries and currencies at the moment,” Dania mentioned. MoonPay is a financial technology company that builds payment infrastructure for crypto. It has processed more than $2 billion in transactions.

Dania is optimistic that Nigeria and the rest of the continent will find more value in trading cryptocurrencies as the market soars.

–Edited by Faustine Ngila
-Photo: Seun Dania, CEO of Tradefada / Tradefada)