Crypto gets blamed for a real-life currency crisis

livemint.com:

Tigran Gambaryan, Binance’s head of financial-crime compliance, flew to Nigeria’s capital to solve a problem: The government had blamed the world’s largest crypto exchange for crashing the currency.

The American, a former Internal Revenue Service special agent, left his wife and children at home in Georgia in late February with a small suitcase for what he thought was a quick business trip.

He hasn’t come back.

Nigerian authorities detained Gambaryan and a colleague, Nadeem Anjarwalla, a U.K. and Kenyan national and Binance’s regional manager for Africa, according to the men’s families.

The Binance employees, who are being held in a guarded house, haven’t been charged with any crimes. The government, which invited them to Nigeria for meetings, hasn’t publicly discussed the detentions.

Nigeria, Africa’s largest economy with a population of more than 220 million, has faced many currency crises before. This is the first time that crypto has played a starring role.

Nigerians flocked to cryptocurrencies in recent years to shelter their savings from a soaring inflation rate, which hit nearly 30% in January, and a plunging currency, one of the worst-performing in the world this year. Two-thirds of the population lives in poverty.

The country has the second-highest adoption of crypto in the world, after India, according to an index compiled by Chainalysis, a data provider. Nigerians received about $60 billion worth of crypto transactions in the 12 months through June 2023, according to Chainalysis.

Because the government rationed who could exchange the local currency for the dollar and at what exchange rate, many sought refuge in digital currencies pegged to the U.S. dollar, known as stablecoins.

The stablecoin trade in essence