Nigeria’s Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has proposed new rules that would allow it to approve new digital and virtual asset operators, set governance requirements, and gain deeper visibility into transactions, wallets, and the movement of digital assets in and out of the country.
The proposed rules, issued on Thursday, would mandate cryptocurrency businesses targeting Nigerian users to register with the SEC, even if they operate from outside the country. The rules cover exchanges, custodians, and virtual asset service providers (VASPs), as well as tokenisation and digital-asset offering platforms.
It marks a significant expansion of the SEC’s approach to regulating crypto in Nigeria, shifting the focus from simply bringing virtual asset businesses into its sandbox framework to issuing operating rules to closely supervise how they operate, move customer assets, and interact with the wider financial system. The proposal underscores one of the key areas where Nigeria’s virtual asset regulation lies: transaction monitoring.
Several virtual asset businesses now face re-enforced costs of operating in the digital asset sector. Exchanges and digital asset custodians would each need ₦2 billion ($1.5 million) in minimum capital, while VASPs would require ₦200 million ($148,400).
Digital asset platform operators (DAPOs) such as token issuers, digital asset offering platforms (DAOPs)—including companies that provide platforms for token issuance—and real-world asset tokenisation platforms (RATOPs) must all maintain minimum capital requirements of ₦500 million ($371,000).
Notably, ancillary virtual asset providers (AVASPs), which provide technological infrastructure for virtual asset businesses, are no longer included in the proposed rules. The category previously carried a minimum capital requirement of ₦300 million ($222,600) under the SEC’s revised guidelines issued in March.
Digital asset exchanges would pay a ₦30 million ($22,270) registration fee, while VASPs would pay ₦15 million ($11,130). But the bigger change may be how much information crypto companies would have to make available to the regulator.
The SEC could require regulated firms to provide application programming interface (API)-based or other electronic access to operational, transactional, financial, wallet, custody, and settlement data.
Digital asset firms would also have to identify and report transactions involving Nigerian residents and cross-border flows, including wallet addresses, transaction values, timestamps, and counterparty information.
“The Commission may refuse to register an applicant where the Commission is not satisfied with the applicant’s information, governance, ownership, financial condition, operational model, technology, risk controls, compliance arrangements, regulatory status or ability to comply with these rules,” the SEC said in the proposed rules.
Exchange operators face additional requirements. Customer assets cannot be freely mixed with company funds, while related-party custody arrangements would require a separately incorporated and regulated custodian.
The SEC is also seeking to pull more of crypto’s newer business models into its regulatory perimeter. Staking, lending, yield products, liquidity pools, peer-to-peer (P2P) and over-the-counter (OTC) trading, and non-custodial wallet services are explicitly addressed in the proposed framework.
The proposal follows the SEC’s recent push to bring more virtual asset companies into its Accelerated Regulatory Incubation Programme (ARIP), with 12 firms admitted since July and on track to receive approvals-in-principle. The pace marks an acceleration from 2025, when new admissions slowed.
The SEC said under the new framework, ARIP approval-in-principle would last two years, but would not amount to full registration and would come with restricted operating scopes and enhanced supervision.
True scale demands moving beyond surface-level integrations to robust execution. We’ve filtered the noise out of Moonshot 2026, optimising the conference strictly for high-calibre connections between startup founders, global financial operators, enterprise leaders and individuals rewiring Africa’s technical frameworks. Get 20% off Early Bird tickets for a limited time.
