After 4 months of development and testing, a team of Nigeria-based programmers lead by Timi Ajiboye have launched dedicated Bitcoin exchange for Africa. The exchange service is named Bitkoin.Africa and seeks to provide legitimate trading opportunities for local cryptocurrency holders. The platform boasts an automated escrow service and the ability to buy Bitcoin using Visa and MasterCard, claims Ajiboye.
The service, launched yesterday, has complete support for Nigeria and partial (buying only) support for all other countries. This service will come as a relief to local holders of the cryptocurrency who are usually have been maligned due to illicit usage of cryptocurrency and spurious regulatory warnings from both the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) and the Securities Exchange Commission (SEC), who have publicly come out to discourage transactions in cryptocurrency.
This service further negotiates the path of cryptocurrency into the legal books of Nigeria, following the opening of Shopnow.ng, an e-commerce site selling several products and accepting only Bitcoin as payment method. The first problem that will need to be solved however is establishing an acceptable value for exchanging Bitcoin. While the newly established Bitkoin.Africa uses a N1,650,000/Bitcoin exchange rate, Shopnow.ng quotes a N650,000/Bitcoin exchange rate for transactions.