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The Nigerian Senate yesterday asked Nigeria Deposit Insurance Corporation, the country's central bank, and the Nigerian Stock Exchange, to investigate the proliferation of bitcoin and do more to educate citizens about "the dangers" of investing in that cryptocurrency.

The decision, reports the financial publication AllNigeriaBanks, was taken after a motion by Senator Benjamin Uwajumogu, in which he called for immediate action against the growing investments of Nigerians in bitcoin.

Many of the fears of the senators are based on the massive scams that occurred in Nigeria in 2016, especially the Mavrodi Mondial Moneybox or MMM, copied from a Ponzi scheme by the Russian Sergei Panteleevich Mavrodi, but deployed a decade later through exchanges with bitcoins. . This led to an investigation by the Nigerian Securities Commission that also involved some allegations against fraudulent handling of swisscoin and onecoin cryptocurrencies.

The Uwajumogu motion, which highlighted the "urgent need to investigate the proliferation of bitcoin to gauge its legitimacy as a means of investment," reflects, according to the Nigerian newspaper Vanguard, the concerns of the Senate not only because of the growing enthusiasm of Nigerians for the bitcoin, but that this asset is marketed openly in the country through radio and television.

This formal request from the Nigerian Senate seems a belated reaction considering that the commercialization of bitcoin in Nigeria has grown vigorously, with weekly trading volumes of 1 billion naira ($ 2 million), thanks to the local bitcoin exchange houses. In August 2017, that volume doubled, as the following graph shows:

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Among the exchange houses that allow Africans to buy and sell bitcoins and other cryptocurrencies in local currencies, the biggest ones are Luno, Ice3X, Golix, and NairaEx. As of 2017, new exchange houses were launched such as Remitano, Belfrics, and CoinDirect. The most popular P2P house, however, remains LocalBitcoins.

In Africa there are still government initiatives that try to regulate bitcoin, but in some countries there is an attitude, but openly in favor of the cryptocurrency, at least it is more flexible. South Africa now allows traffic fines to be paid with bitcoins, through Fines4U, a company that administers such fines.