Binance vs the government

This year has been a crazy one for my country Nigeria and we are still in the first quarter of the year! A lot has happened in the last 2 months but my major focus right now is the economy that has decided to take a deep dive into the ocean trench. Our currency (the naira) is fighting a losing battle against the dollar and it just kept getting worse every day until the government woke up one morning and decided to hold Binance responsible for what is happening to the currency. Yeah, they did that.

I fail to see how Binance is causing what is happening to my country's currency but the government latched on to Binance as the culprit and refused to let go. They threatened to ban Nigerians from using Binance and they actually did but just like how they banned Twitter a couple of years ago, many of us still accessed the platform with VPNs. I knew things were going to get worse when Binance announced that they were working with the Nigerian government to block the naira-dollar exchange on the platform and a few days later, they did!

It was a Wednesday (the last Wednesday of February) and I even did a trade on the p2p market earlier that day but later on, I started seeing news that Binance p2p has been disabled for Nigerians. I didn't believe it at first but when I checked, I was shocked to see it was true. At that point, several thoughts ran through my head; "what's the alternative now?" The sweet thing about the blockchain is that there are a lot of ways of doing the same thing and if I can no longer do p2p trade on Binance, there are other exchanges out there.

Luckily, 2 other exchanges started trending on X (formerly Twitter) and TikTok; Bybit and Kucoin. I immediately checked them out and to be honest I don't like them, nothing beats Binance. Unfortunately for now, they are necessary because they are the only means I can sell my crypto and get cash in my local currency. The worst thing about these other exchanges is that Hive isn't listed there, but luckily I can still transfer my Hive to Binance, convert to USDT, then transfer to Bybit or Kucoin to use their p2p. It's an added stress but at this point, I have no other choice.

The Nigerian government is making life unbearable for everyone in the country, especially the youths. They are always bringing up new policies that make it increasingly difficult to earn money from the international community. Right now, you will have to go through hell if you want to get paid after a job for an international client. People ended up using cryptocurrency, especially USDT to receive payment for services they render to international clients and now the government is still trying to strangle that sector as well.

The blockchain is one of the best inventions of the last 20 years and I just love how it's out of the control of the government. They have tried so many ways to regulate it and the best they could do is to put a least on exchanges. Sometimes I wonder if the government would be able to come up with a way to fully regulate cryptocurrency, the US probably have a secret research centre somewhere with the main goal of breaking the blockchain. It's fair to say that it's an impossible thing to do but remember that people once considered flying an impossible thing but today we have aeroplanes and helicopters. No one knows what the future might hold for the blockchain

Thanks for reading

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