Kenya’s Increased Engagement in Bitcoin Trading Underlines Africa’s Potential for the Future

Over the past two or three years, the involvement of some African nations in crypto has become quite evident. A lot of bitcoin-related trading activity can be seen in different countries, and according to Arcane Research’s recent report, bitcoin trading in Kenya has picked up pace over the past month.

In the midst of the global lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic, it was noted that Bitcoin‘s trading volume over the last seven days has crossed a major milestone of 100 BTC per week in Paxful Exchange.

Although the volume is particularly lower compared to what can usually be seen in major exchanges, the engagement of users was more important as it indicated that people were not taking their eye of the BTC market.

 

The report also suggested that Paxful exchange was a major exchange in Kenya, and over the last few months the platform has been largely outperformed by LocalBitcoins.

Kenya has been getting its grip over the market shares in the P2P market and recently surpassed 3 percent of the total Bitcoin volume on Paxful exchange. Overall, Paxful and Local Bitcoins accounted for 2.1 percent of the total P2P Bitcoin Market.

In addition, it was also highlighted that since the beginning of 2019, bitcoin trading volume in Kenya has increased by 190% in US dollars and is currently above $1 million in weekly volume.

Bitcoin, Kenya and the African Continent

Before it all began in February, the CEO of Twitter and Square Crypto, Jack Dorsey had been to Africa, and
after his return, he believed that Africa had a massive potential to determine the future of cryptocurrency and Bitcoin.

In light of that matter, African nations have been in the thick of things with regards to crypto.

Back in October 2019, a research was conducted by Citigroup to identify the nations which had the highest per-capita holdings of Bitcoin. To most of the peoples’ surprise, the United States was not one of the major countries in the list and none of the Asian countries made the list as well.

The top eight countries which had the highest per capita holding of Bitcoin included Russia, New Zealand, Ukraine, Columbia, and the UK. The other nations were represented from the African continent which included Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa.

Such statistics underlined the potential of the African nations in the crypto industry and it is possible Jack Dorsey’s prenomination is correct over the next 10 years.

 

Utkarsh Gupta: Professional journalist with a proven experience of working in the online media industry. Experienced in Web Content Creation, Editing, Publishing, Journalism, and Creative Writing.