Nigeria's central bank opens a stablecoin track in its sandbox

What happened

The Central Bank of Nigeria opened the second cohort of its regulatory sandbox on 11 August 2026 with a dedicated track for virtual asset service providers, and the programme's own portal carries the terms. The track supports 'digital assets that are fiat backed or have a payment, settlement, or store of value function', and the activities it lists as eligible are fiat-backed stablecoin payments, stablecoin issuance models, virtual asset payments, digital wallet infrastructure, custody solutions, token-based products, fiat on and off-ramp services, and stablecoin and payment-token exchanges. A second track, for data-enabled financial services, covers open banking data exchange, account aggregation, payment initiation, fraud and risk analytics and credit decisioning. Applicants may be institutions the bank licenses, institutions licensed by other Nigerian or foreign financial regulators, virtual asset service providers, or startups with no financial licence at all, provided the product is ready for live testing with real users; applications involving stablecoins, custody, wallet infrastructure, token issuance or smart-contract arrangements must come with governance, technology, reserves, disclosure and risk-control documentation. Approved participants test inside limits on user categories, transaction volumes, customer exposure and duration, and must show arrangements for complaints handling, cybersecurity, data protection, operational resilience and orderly wind-down. The portal states that admission 'does not amount to a permanent licence or regulatory approval to operate beyond the approved testing parameters'; that the programme 'covers stablecoins, payment tokens, and non-security digital assets that perform a payment, settlement, or store-of-value function'; and that admission 'does not confer, and is not a substitute for, any other regulatory agency's registration, authorisation, or approval'. For successful participants, 'particularly Virtual Asset Service Providers (VASPs)', it says outcomes 'may inform the appropriate post-sandbox regulatory pathway'. The statement announcing the cohort was issued by Hakama Sidi-Ali, acting director of corporate communications and investor relations, and says Cohort 2 'introduces two dedicated testing tracks to support emerging technologies with the potential to strengthen Nigeria's financial system while upholding high standards of consumer protection, financial stability, and market integrity'. That statement is quoted here from Punch, which carries it at length, because the bank's own document sits behind a challenge page this desk could not pass. Applications open on 12 August and close on 31 August. The bank opened the first cohort in December 2022, closed it on 1 February 2023 and reported more than a thousand applications, according to Punch.

Why it matters

Nigeria's constraint has not been a shortage of stablecoin activity but a shortage of ways to authorise it. The bank barred banks from servicing cryptoasset accounts in February 2021 and reversed that in its Payments System Vision 2028 of June 2026, which proposed treating fully fiat-collateralised stablecoins as monetary instruments subject to its licensing, full high-quality reserves, daily attestations and monthly audits, with naira reserves held onshore by licensed Nigerian custodians. A proposal is not a route, and this is the route: a supervised live test with reporting and incident obligations, whose findings the bank says may inform a participant's post-sandbox regulatory pathway. That is how a policy document becomes a licence regime with firms already standing inside it, and it prices differently for whoever is first. The business it bears on hardest is the corridor. Personal remittances into Nigeria were $22.8bn in 2025 on World Bank figures, the highest since 2019, and the cost of moving that money is the margin the stablecoin rails are competing for; an issuer holding onshore reserves against daily attestation carries a cost an unlicensed one does not, and until now no Nigerian firm could choose to bear it in exchange for the standing. The second thing in the document is a boundary. The bank says its sandbox 'is distinct and separate from any other regulatory sandbox programmes' and scopes it to payment tokens and non-security digital assets, while stating that admission substitutes for no other agency's approval. Nigeria's Securities and Exchange Commission has had token issuance, exchanges and custody within its remit since the Investments and Securities Act 2025 brought digital assets inside the statutory definition of securities, and admits firms through its own Accelerated Regulatory Incubation Programme. So a token that pays is the central bank's and a token that is an investment is the Commission's, and a firm doing both needs both. Kenya divided the same supervision between its central bank and its capital markets authority by regulation this year. Nigeria is arriving at the same split by carve-out in the terms of a sandbox, which is faster and less durable.

What is not settled

How many places the cohort has, how long a test runs, and what a participant may do at the end of one are not in anything that could be read. The portal says limits will be set on user categories, volumes, exposure and duration without saying what they are, and the two documents that would carry the detail, the call for application for Cohort 2 and the framework for sandbox operations, are published on the portal and sit behind a challenge page this desk could not pass, so the numbers may exist and were not read here. Nor is the relationship to what came before it clear. The bank opened a virtual asset service provider supervisory pilot on 31 March 2026 whose participants included Flutterwave, Paystack and the cNGN issuer WrappedCBDC; the portal does not mention it, and whether those firms carry over, reapply or sit outside the cohort is unaddressed. Nothing states what the reserve, attestation and audit requirements proposed in Payments System Vision 2028 amount to inside a test, or whether the supervisory observer nodes that document proposed are part of this. On the securities boundary, the portal asserts the limit without saying who decides that a token performs a payment function rather than an investment one, which is the question a stablecoin paying a yield would put. The reports agree on the substance and not on the day: Punch timestamps the statement to the evening of 11 August and the window to the 12th, Daily Trust and TechCabal publish on the 12th, and Vanguard's report of the 12th says in one sentence that the bank opened applications yesterday and in the next that applications open today. The portal itself carries no date.