State of Bitcoin Literature in Africa: Part 6
Mayowa Joy David and Atta Addo’s 2025 study offers one of the first empirical examinations of cryptocurrency use for cross-border trade in the African context, a significant gap that researchers have flagged for years but rarely filled.
Its value lies in going into the field rather than adding to an already crowded body of conceptual work.
Focusing on Lagos’s Computer Village — an electronics hub hosting more than 5,000 informal MSMEs — the paper applies actor-network theory (ANT) and qualitative interviews to trace how Nigerian importers pay Chinese suppliers through broker-mediated crypto arrangements.
The findings challenge one of ICT4D scholarship's longstanding assumptions: that developing countries lag in technology adoption due to poor infrastructure, low digital literacy, and distrust of online transactions.
Countries such as Nigeria, South Africa, and Kenya are not lagging in this technology; they are instead leading it.
The network the study uncovers is more layered than the adoption numbers alone suggest. Merchant use of crypto is often indirect. Many retailers rely on brokers to handle wallets, secure liquidity, and execute settlements.
In practice, Naira flows to brokers, who acquire USDT through OTC exchanges, route transactions through intermediaries to Chinese crypto traders, who then convert into RMB and pay suppliers directly. The supplier often never holds cryptocurrency at all.
This arrangement delivers faster and cheaper cross-border settlement than formal banking systems have managed in this corridor. Adoption is therefore being driven by brokers who identified an opportunity, established trust, absorbed early losses, and built the infrastructure layer that makes broader retail participation viable.
The study also underscores the role of non-human actors in sustaining this system. Stablecoins, mobile wallets, escrow systems, and peer-to-peer platforms help stabilize transactions and, in practice, determine who can participate in the network.
Adoption here emerges from the alignment between human coordination and material infrastructure rather than from technological properties alone.
The policy recommendations remain relatively high-level, and evidence on transaction failures, non-adopters, and variation across trade corridors remains limited. Questions of scale and durability under tighter regulatory or liquidity conditions also remain open.
These limitations do not diminish what this paper establishes. For researchers and institutions working on Bitcoin adoption in Africa, this study provides rare field-level evidence of how informal crypto payment infrastructure actually functions in practice.
At a moment when regulators and development institutions are forming views about crypto’s role in African trade, the questions that matter most are no longer abstract debates about technological potential.
The more important questions concern who builds these networks, how trust is constructed, and why adoption continues spreading even without institutional backing.
For further reading:
David, M. J., & Addo, A. A. (2025). Cryptocurrency use for cross-border payments: Understanding the popularity of crypto among Nigerians importing from China. Information Technology & People.
