Nigeria's Securities and Exchange Commission has now admitted more than a dozen firms into its Accelerated Regulatory Incubation Programme (ARIP), with Yellow Card, Blockchain.com and others joining in August 2026.
Yellow Card is one of Africa's largest stablecoin companies, and its entry shows what the SEC is doing more broadly: bringing crypto exchanges and payment firms under formal regulation a few at a time, rather than switching on one big rulebook for everyone at once.
The technology these firms run has grown faster than the rules meant to govern it. In Nigeria, stablecoins are now used to move and store money for businesses, and increasingly for banks and other regulated institutions, well beyond their early use in retail trading. The gap between what these firms can already do and how closely they are supervised is where the real compliance risk sits, and it is why this moment is worth paying attention to.
What does membership in ARIP bring?
ARIP launched in June 2024 as a supervised path toward full registration, drawing its authority from the Investments and Securities Act. Admission gives a firm Approval-in-Principle, a status that essential provides a provisional green light. An AIP is not a full licence: it is conditional, revocable, and tied to continued compliance with the Commission's operational and supervisory requirements, including registration with the Nigerian Financial Intelligence Unit.
The practical effect is that admitted firms operate inside defined scope while carrying live obligations from day one. Ongoing reporting, monitoring and demonstrable controls are the price of staying inside the perimeter, required from the outset rather than deferred until a final licence arrives.
Yellow Card and Flutterwave
These two entities are the clearest examples of how far crypto infrastructure has developed before coming under regulation.
Yellow Card closed its retail trading business at the start of 2026 to focus on B2B stablecoin rails, treasury and settlement. It raised $40 million in August and already sits behind institutional programmes with Visa and Mastercard. The firm now entering Nigeria's perimeter is a stablecoin infrastructure provider serving businesses and banks.
Flutterwave, meanwhile, launched stablecoin balances for merchants in January, added USDC settlement with Circle and RLUSD through Ripple, and in August extended dedicated USD accounts across ACH, Fedwire, RTP and SWIFT through a partnership with Caliza. The same rails now support its own treasury operations, moving large-value positions across custody and liquidity.
Between the two of them, both have large value moving through their system, even across borders. Stablecoin flows are settling supplier payments, payroll and treasury transfers at a business scale and is continuing to grow.
The rulebook is now taking shape
ARIP was always framed as a supervised on-ramp rather than the finished regime, and that framing has just gained substance. On 20 August 2026, the SEC published a formal proposal, Rules on Digital and Virtual Asset Operations, Custody and Markets, opening a two-week public consultation running to 3 September.
The scope is deliberately wide. It would capture any digital asset business operating in Nigeria, serving Nigerian residents, or targeting Nigerian investors, directly, indirectly, or through digital channels, regardless of where the firm is incorporated. Applicants would generally need to incorporate locally, keep a registered office in the country, and appoint a resident chief executive or equivalent principal officer.
The financial thresholds vary by licence class. Digital Asset Exchanges and Custodians would face a ₦2 billion minimum capital requirement plus a ₦30 million registration fee, alongside a fidelity insurance bond covering at least a quarter of that capital. Custodians would also need to hold at least 80% of client assets in cold storage. General VASPs sit at a lower ₦200 million capital threshold. Stablecoin issuers face their own tiered reserve floors: 100% backing for naira and commodity-backed tokens, 120% for foreign-currency-backed tokens, and 150% to 200% for crypto-backed tokens depending on volatility and collateral quality. Foreign stablecoin issuers targeting the Nigerian market would need a local representative and would have to meet the same prudential tests.
None of this is in force yet. It remains a proposal under consultation. But it confirms the direction ARIP already signalled: firms that can already show, on demand, where value entered their system and where it went are the ones best placed to move from provisional approval to a full licence once these rules land.
What does this signal?
moves across several different players in a single journey: a crypto firm, a payment provider, a stablecoin issuer and a regulated bank. How those players connect is becoming the defining feature of the market.
Risk now spans a number of companies at once: a single flow can pass through a VASP, a payment provider, a stablecoin issuer and a regulated bank. The picture that matters follows value across all four, and any view built around one category alone loses sight of it at the seams.
Supervision must be continuous: AIP status, and the proposed rules that would follow it, ask firms to demonstrate, on an ongoing basis, that they meet AML and reporting obligations, which is difficult to evidence without live transaction monitoring and clear audit trails.
Stablecoins need their own kind of monitoring: risks tied to who issued a token, which blockchain it runs on and who sits on the other end of a transaction fall outside standard bank checks. Useful screening has to reach the actual crypto wallet and the people behind it, rather than stopping at the bank account. The proposed reserve and custody tests only sharpen this: proving 100% to 200% backing or 80% cold storage compliance requires visibility into the underlying wallets, not just balance sheet attestations.
Taken together, monitoring and intelligence need to follow value end to end across the full chain of participants, rather than examining each in isolation. Nigeria is regulating crypto step by step while the technology already runs live underneath, and the pace is now picking up: ARIP got firms inside the perimeter, and the rules proposed on 20 August set the terms for what staying there will require. As firms move from provisional approval toward full registration, the ones in the strongest position are those that can already answer the regulator's basic question at any moment: where did this money come from, and where is it going?
From NOMINIS's view of the region, Nigeria looks like an early model for how crypto markets across Africa will develop: regulation arriving gradually then hardening quickly, the infrastructure already in use, and the way the two meet becoming the real story for compliance and intelligence teams.
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