cNGN has processed roughly $145 million in trading volume and about 350,000 transactions since launching in 2025.Despite that growth, many Nigerian fintechs have not integrated the regulated naira stablecoin.Industry leaders argue the challenge isn’t regulation or technology — it’s economics, developer adoption, liquidity, and distribution.The story highlights the broader challenge facing local-currency stablecoins across Africa.
The Compliant Naira, cNGN for short, issued by WrappedCBDC under the African Stablecoin Consortium, launched in February 2025.
cNGN is a Nigerian stablecoin pegged 1:1 to the Nigerian Naira. It was issued under the 2025 Investments and Securities Act, which grants the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) authority over digital assets. The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) retains oversight of payment systems.
For WrappedCBDC, the motivation behind creating cNGN was the difficulty Nigerians faced buying dollar-based stablecoins. The company also sought to address the loss of value incurred due to transaction fees when converting those stablecoins back to naira.
The cNGN is not the first digital asset foray tied to the Nigerian Naira. In October 2021, the Central Bank of Nigeria launched the eNaira. While the latter is a state-issued digital currency, cNGN is privately managed and blockchain-native.
cNGN Has Activity, But Adoption Remains Narrow
cNGN has recorded nearly ₦200 billion (~$145 million) in total Traded Volume across approximately 350,000 onchain transactions as of writing.
These numbers make it one of Africa’s most active regulated local-currency stablecoin projects by transaction value. But the numbers tell only part of the story. The transaction count and the total number of holders, which is slightly over 5,300, suggest activity remains concentrated.
This concentration indicates that cNGN isn’t being used for widespread merchant payments, retail purchases, or remittances, indicating low adoption.
Transaction value and ecosystem adoption are distinct metrics, and on the second measure, cNGN still has ground to cover.
Why Fintechs Aren’t Integrating cNGN
Speaking at the 2nd Edition of the Crypto & DeFi Forum, Seun Langele, co-founder of Polytope Labs and former Ethereum developer, said cNGN’s biggest problem isn’t the technology.
cNGN has been live for over a year now; like, how many people are actually building applications on cNGN? How many fintechs have integrated it?We can philosophize all we want on how we can become infrastructure builders. Still, if we operate in a culture that is distrustful of new technology, then that is not a welcoming environment for builders.
Harri Obi, Former Regional (Africa) Marketing Manager for Bitget and lead at SuperteamNG, shares similar sentiments.
For the few fintechs I’ve spoken to, the economics aren’t compelling enough. If they’re already settling via bank transfers or dollar stablecoins, adding another asset means engineering work, compliance reviews, treasury management, and liquidity provisioning.Unless CNGN can significantly lower costs, improve settlement speed, or unlock new revenue, it’s hard to justify prioritizing it over existing infrastructure.
That economic calculus matters enormously in a sector already stretched thin. Every new payment rail a fintech integrates creates real costs. In a capital-tight market, spending that money requires justification.
One X user said, “We were looking to add cNGN for the new agricultural investment we pushed on our platform. After all the bottlenecks, we just went with direct bank transfers, because it wasn’t worth it.”
Seun Langele also believes that “cNGN is not without its issues, which primarily are low liquidity for cNGN/NGN.”
However, he “expects people to be enthusiastic and speculate on what it can become in its final form, not meet it with irrational skepticism whenever it’s brought up.”
The Real Problem Isn’t Technology — It’s Distribution
cNGN has the technology. It has the regulatory license. According to Harri Obi, what it lacks is the network of developers, merchants, and builders needed to make it indispensable.
Beyond fintechs and businesses, CNGN’s most important adoption drivers are developers, i.e blockchain ecosystems and developer communities. Yet I haven’t seen CNGN invest meaningfully in developer activations, technical workshops, or hackathons at scale.
Stablecoins need ecosystems, not just licenses. M-Pesa did not become dominant because of a government mandate or even its license. It grew because it solved a problem; M-Pesa made sending money cheaper and simpler than any alternative.
USDT and USDC did not achieve global reach through regulatory approval alone; they solved a distribution problem by becoming the default rails that developers and merchants actually built on.
cNGN needs the same. Where are the public APIs? The grant programs? The merchant integrations? The developer documentation that makes it easier to build with cNGN than without it? These are the building blocks of adoption, and right now, they remain underdeveloped.
The Competition Is Harder Than It Looks
cNGN is not competing in a vacuum. Domestically, it sits alongside a mature payments infrastructure.
Between 2022 and 2024, the Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement System Plc (NIBSS) Instant Payments Platform (NIP) saw a 120% rise in processed transactions, from N5 billion to N11 billion. This figure places Nigeria among the most active real-time payments markets in the world.
Moniepoint, PalmPay, OPay, and Flutterwave have already captured deep merchant and consumer loyalty across their respective infrastructures.
These Neobanks provided reliable transfers when traditional banks had unreliable apps and USSD. They provided free transfers and referral bonuses, lowering transaction costs. During Nigeria’s cash scarcity in 2023, its tech infrastructure didn’t collapse amid the surge in digital transactions.
Flutterwave solved the heavily fragmented African payment landscape and became a unicorn.
Internationally, the competitive picture is even steeper. Nigerians continue to choose USDT and USDC over cNGN. The IMF recently issued Nigeria a warning regarding the use of dollar-pegged stablecoins in the country.
According to a 2026 BVNK report, Nigeria leads the world in the adoption of a dollar-pegged stablecoin. 87% of respondents currently/recently held stablecoins, and 80% planned to acquire them.
Amongst the respondents, nearly 60% owned USDT and an estimated 48% held USDC. For many, these stablecoins protect them from currency depreciation, are much easier to access than cNGN, and make remittances cheaper.
Beyond that, USDT and USDC also carry years of liquidity, wallet support, exchange integrations, and developer tooling that cNGN cannot yet match.
This means cNGN isn’t creating a new market from scratch. It is trying to replace, or at minimum, compete with, deeply entrenched payment behavior on two fronts simultaneously.
What This Means for Africa’s Local Stablecoin Movement
cNGN’s challenge is not unique to Nigeria. Across the continent, countries are exploring the regulation of local-currency stablecoins.
ZARU, a stablecoin backed 1:1 to the Rand, launched in February 2026. Luno, Sanlam, EasyEquities, and Lesaka launched the project.
In May 2026, Tanzania greenlit its first stablecoin sandbox pilot to test nTZS, a stablecoin pegged to the Tanzanian shilling.
Kenya continues to refine its stablecoin regulatory framework. Each project will confront the same structural question: what comes after the license?
State-backed digital currency, eNaira, serves as a cautionary tale. Despite launching 2 years prior, by 2023, less than 1% of banking customers used the eNaira. Less than 2% of those who downloaded the eNaira wallet actually used it.
The eNaira accounts for less than 1% of total currency in circulation. The low adoption is attributed partly to low bank penetration rates and restrictions on how much retail users could hold. Regulatory approval, in that case, was never enough to drive real-world use.
Successful projects will need to prioritize problem-solving and ecosystem-building as urgently as they pursue regulatory approval.
Regulation Doesn’t Create Product-Market Fit
Africa’s recent wave of crypto regulation has focused heavily on licensing, compliance, and oversight, all of which are necessary. Despite the cNGN doing everything right, regulation-wise, one thing is clear: regulation cannot force adoption.
Stablecoin adoption is driven by the need for faster, cheaper remittances and by currency volatility. Dollar-pegged stablecoin activity in Nigeria saw a surge in recent years, driven by naira volatility, the same currency cNGN ties its value to.
For many users, a stablecoin tied to a volatile currency defeats the purpose of stablecoin use.
Beyond that, Seun Langele points out in a tweet that the adoption problem for cNGN is also a trust problem. Cryptocurrency is already met with skepticism by many; Langele points out that “a lot of people have told me that they don’t ‘trust’ cNGN.”
All of these factors, combined with the aforementioned barriers to entry, have restricted the adoption of cNGN by users and fintechs.
In Harri Obi’s words,
The problems of CNGN are multifaceted. I can write an entire book about it. I was only speaking [on] the fintech part, and every top founder I’ve spoken to about this has basically said cNGN is simply a solution looking for a problem.
The Need for Indispensable Infrastructure
For cNGN to expand, it needs clear economic incentives, developer engagement, enterprise integrations, merchant acceptance, and user demand.
Across Africa, the next phase of stablecoin growth will be won by those who become indispensable. Indispensable to developers, businesses, and payment providers looking for something better than what already exists.
cNGN is not there yet; it needs to prove its economic value.
Originally published at https://cryptoafrica.news on June 29, 2026.
Why Nigerian Fintechs Are Still Hesitant to Integrate cNGN Stablecoin was originally published in Coinmonks on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.