Regardless of bitcoin’s price volatility, 2018 saw an explosion of activity among African users.
Revealed exclusively to CoinDesk, the peer-to-peer bitcoin exchange Paxful increased its transaction volume by 130 percent since January 2018 with an average of $21 million a week, compared to $8.5 million in 2017. The growth was driven in part by Paxful’s user base almost tripling in Ghana, with 41,243 accounts, and more than doubling in Nigeria to 321,476 accounts.
According to Paxful CEO Ray Youssef, African bitcoin traders accounted for 41 percent of all of the platform’s new users in 2018. On average, their transactions are worth less than $90 each. African users now make up roughly 35 percent of accounts on Paxful, a platform with 160,000 monthly users.