Customers of the card fintech Allawee got an email recently giving them until 30 November to move their money, replace their cards and tell everyone who pays them that their account details are changing. It was orderly, as these things go. Somebody was clearly in charge of the wind-down.
Now imagine that email came from your crypto app instead. Would you know whether your coins had ever been kept separate from the company’s own money?
That’s the question Nigeria’s Securities and Exchange Commission spent August trying to answer, and the window for anyone to argue with its answer closed today.
What Closed Today
On 20 August the SEC published its proposed Rules on Digital and Virtual Assets Operations, Custody and Markets and gave the public two weeks to send comments to its Rules Committee, by email. Two weeks was up today. The Commission now reviews what came in and issues final rules. No date has been given for that.
Nigeria ranked sixth in Chainalysis’s most recent global crypto adoption index, and sub-Saharan Africa took in more than $205 billion in on-chain value in the year to June 2025. Almost nobody behind those numbers reads exposure drafts.
What Actually Changes For Your Money
Your coins get legally separated from the company’s. A custodian would have to segregate client assets from its own and from any affiliate’s, and the draft says client assets are protected from the custodian’s creditors and from its insolvency proceedings. If your platform collapses, your holdings aren’t meant to be part of the wreckage.
At least 80% goes offline. Custodians must keep no less than 80% of client assets in cold storage, which means wallets not connected to the internet. Whatever stays online is capped at what’s genuinely needed to process withdrawals.
Custody has to be a separate company. An exchange can’t quietly serve as its own vault. Custody sits in its own legal entity, and mixing it with trading or lending needs express approval.
Breaches get reported fast. Initial notice to the SEC within 24 hours, a detailed report within 48.
Influencer promos get rules. Anyone paid to push a platform has to disclose the payment, and promoting an unregistered platform is barred outright.
What It Doesn’t Do
This isn’t deposit insurance. Firms would need insurance, a fidelity bond or equivalent cover for losses from fraud, custody failure or a hack, and the draft states plainly that none of it can be marketed to you as protection against prices falling. If bitcoin drops, that’s still your loss.
One number worth reading carefully. The ₦1 million per issuer and ₦10 million annual retail limits being widely reported sit in the section on digital asset offerings, meaning new token sales. They don’t cap what you buy and sell on an exchange. Buy into an offering and you also get a five-business-day cooling-off window with a full refund.
Then there’s the cost of staying. To register at all, a firm has to be incorporated in Nigeria, keep a registered office here and have its chief executive resident in the country, and most applicants go through the SEC’s incubation programme before full registration. Offshore platforms currently serving Nigerians from abroad would need a local compliance route or an exit. Which means the realistic risk to your money over the next year isn’t a hacker. It’s an email like Allawee’s.
What To Check On Your Platform
Whether it’s registered with the SEC or operating under the Commission’s incubation programme. Whether it publishes proof of reserves. Whether you know how to move your holdings into a wallet you control. And how long a full withdrawal actually takes, which you find out by testing a small one, not by reading the FAQ.
Kenya’s creators organised publicly within days when Google began withholding tax on their YouTube earnings. Nigerian crypto holders have no equivalent voice, and a two-week email window was never going to produce one. Most of the comments the SEC received will have come from law firms and the platforms themselves. The rules they shape apply to everybody else.
