The Nigerian Web 3 scene is dominated by foreign products and startups founded by foreign crypto entrepreneurs who are usually building for the global market.
This fact coupled with the general trust Nigerians tend to place in foreign products over local ones can pose a slight challenge for Nigerian crypto entrepreneurs looking to build their products and compete in the marketplace.
Despite this challenge, some Nigerian crypto entrepreneurs are still forging ahead to build homegrown products that are punching above their weight and competing with foreign-owned projects which are usually better funded and marketed.
Nigeria was recently named among the top 10 countries in the world in terms of Crypto adoption by Chainalysis and a huge part of the Nigerian Web 3 community activity borders on crypto trading.
The Crypto exchange market in Nigeria is a tedious one given the high rate of crypto trading in the country’s Web 3 space.
Although Crypto exchanges like Binance and Bybit are quite dominant in the Nigerian market, Some Nigerian crypto exchanges founded by Nigerians and Africans are also gaining a foothold in the Nigerian market and carving out portions of the market share for themselves.
In this article, we are going to look at the Founders of top Nigerian and African crypto exchanges competing in the Nigerian and African markets.
Exchange Founded: Quidax
Year: 2017
Quidax was launched in 2018 by Buchi Okoro (Co-Founder/CEO), Uzo Awili (Co-Founder/CTO), and Morris Ebieroma (Co-Founder/CIO).
Quidax has gone on to become the first crypto exchange to receive a provisional Digital Assets Exchange license from Nigeria’s Securities and Exchange Commission.
Buchi Okoro explained that he developed the vision to build Quidax with his team after an unfortunate incident where he got scammed when trying to trade cryptocurrencies.
He reiterated that his goal after the incident was to create a trading platform where people can trade crypto assets safely in Nigeria and Africa hence Quidax was born.
Buchi is an alumnus of Covenant University and Awili and Ebieroma also Convenant colleagues worked together to build Quidax.
The platform was launched in 2017 after the founders received seed funding and entered the TechStar Accelerator Program.
