Market News
Crypto Demand In Africa Rises Amid Stricter Compliance - INDEPEPNDENT
LAGOS – As global regulations tighten and crypto fraud surges by 48%, African crypto platforms must brace for increasing user demand, stricter compliance and rising user expectations.
This is according to the State of the Crypto Industry 2025 report from full-cycle verification platform, Sumsub.
Key highlights of the study include: 2024 was ‘a year of onboarding’ for crypto exchanges: crypto platforms experienced a 20% rise in traffic during major market events such as the re-election of President Donald Trump and Bitcoin rallies in November 2024.
In Africa, Nigeria recorded the highest rate of fraud across the crypto sector at 8.3%, and showed a 75% average pass rate; the lowest amongst its regional African peers.
Ghana, Namibia, Kenya, Algeria, Morocco, Uganda, South Africa and Tunisia all showed pass rates above 90% with Tanzania and Nigeria dipping lower.
South Africa, Algeria, Ghana and Morocco were among the Top-10 African countries in terms of speed of verification with times of 20-seconds or less.
Kenya trailed with times of 29 seconds, but showed increased verification speed for document-free verification at 4-seconds only, surpassed only by Nigeria with 3-seconds.
Fraud in the crypto industry has soared by 48%, with document forgery constituting 31% of all detected fraud cases.
Globally 60% of crypto companies foresee stricter regulations, while only 29% fully comply with the Travel Rule.
As the industry navigates a pivotal period of growth and regulation, the report identifies three critical challenges that crypto providers faced in 2024 and should address in 2025 in order to succeed: security threats, technology capabilities, and regulation.
Sumsub’s data reveals that fraud in the crypto industry has gone up by 48%, now making up 2,2% of all verification attempts across global crypto platforms.
This surge highlights the need for companies to adopt AI-powered detection, biometrics, and continuous monitoring to enhance security.
Nigeria recorded the highest rate of fraud across the crypto sector, with 8,3% of verification attempts flagged as fraudulent. Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania all have fraud rates of 4,8%, with Cameroon (4,5%), Ethiopia (3,7%), Ghana (3,5%), Algeria (2,6%), Benin (2,6%) and Morocco (2,1%) recording significant rates.
The most popular fraud types are document forgery (affecting 31% of surveyed companies), phishing (20%) and money mulling (15%), followed by account takeover (14%) and forced verification (12%).
Innovations like biometric checks, AI-backed automation and document-free verification have boosted crypto platform users’ onboarding success rates to 93.39% and reduced verification time by 46%, overall improving customer onboarding while reducing drop-off cases.
The report highlights notable innovations like document-free verification, which has enhanced verification times in every country where it was implemented, with an average improvement of 3,6%.
