Crypto Demand In Africa Rises Amid Stricter Compliance

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%.