4 entries.
The CBN unveiled its Payments System Vision 2028 in Abuja on 1 June, the roadmap promised when the Payments Service Providers Committee launched in April (cpm-2026-0019). The headline target is 95% financial inclusion by 2028, but the regulatory story is stablecoins: the document references them dozens of times and proposes an enabling framework recognising fiat-collateralised stablecoins as a distinct category of digital monetary instrument, with CBN licensing, full high-quality reserve backing, daily attestations, monthly audits and real-time supervisory visibility. The eNaira is repositioned as payment infrastructure rather than a consumer product, and the vision contemplates regulated stablecoins in live cross-border corridors for trade and remittances. Five years after ordering banks away from crypto, Nigeria's central bank is designing stablecoins into its payments architecture. The framework's legal form is the thing to watch next.
Effective 19 May 2026, Nigerian equities and commodities settle T+1. It is a market-plumbing change rather than a crypto rule, but it belongs on this monitor for what it signals: the same regulator writing VASP-adjacent rules is compressing settlement toward the T+0 world that tokenized markets assume. Brokers, custodians and clearing members had days rather than months to re-tool reconciliation, a preview of the operational tempo African market infrastructure reform is now running at.
SEC Nigeria published Rules on Commodity Exchanges, Warehouse Receipt Systems and Collateral Management under ISA 2025, setting licensing and operational standards for commodity market participants, including real-world asset tokenization. Paired with Ghana's Africoin sandbox admission a month earlier, this is the second African regulator in a quarter to give agricultural and natural-resource tokenization an explicit legal home. Licensing pathways were expected Q2 to Q3 2026; platforms building RWA products on Nigerian rails now have a rulebook to design against.
The CBN inaugurated a joint Payments Service Providers Committee bringing the central bank, commercial banks, mobile money operators and fintechs to one table, after Nigeria's payment system crossed the quadrillion-naira mark with 11.2 billion transactions in 2024. A new Payments System Vision was promised within a month of launch. For digital assets the interesting part is the grey zone the committee will inevitably touch: cross-border payments, stablecoin-adjacent services and BNPL currently sit between licensing categories, and a coordination body is where those lines get redrawn. Re-verified 6 July 2026: the promised vision arrived on 1 June as the Payments System Vision 2028, with stablecoins written into it (cpm-2026-0024).
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