The executive order focuses on harmonising regulation related to the digital economy.
Nigeria has issued an executive order to enhance regulation of crypto-assets.
The State House in Abuja announced on Saturday (18 July) that Nigerian President Bola Ahmed Tinubu had signed the Presidential Executive Order on Virtual Assets Coordination 2026 on 17 July, with immediate effect.
Its stated aim is to harmonise digital-asset regulation, and improve collaboration between the state bodies responsible for tax collection, and regulation of the financial and capital markets, while also reducing fraud, promoting financial stability and encouraging sustainable innovation.
The executive order creates a Virtual Asset Council (VAC) with a policy-steering role to strengthen inter-agency coordination. The VAC is made up of state agencies, with the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) acting as chair, with the vice-chair roles filled by the Nigeria Revenue Service (NRS) and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and including the Nigerian Financial Intelligence Unit (NFIU) and the Office of the National Security Adviser (ONSA).
The order will neither create new bodies nor change the remit of existing regulators, but will instead coordinate the regulators’ work and responsibilities via a new framework, which will also stipulate a registration requirement for users, pertaining to the area of business and the assets concerned. It should go some way to reducing the challenges of keeping up with the pace of change in the digital economy, with bad actors exploiting loopholes to commit crimes such as money laundering and financing of terrorism.
A statement from the State House spoke of “a regulatory environment that has become fragmented as virtual assets increasingly blur the traditional boundaries between currencies, money, commodities and securities”, further adding: “The order is designed to close these gaps through supervisory coordination, without introducing new layers of regulation or displacing the mandates of existing agencies.”
In June, a South African High Court judge ruled that cryptocurrency is money.
