The Nigerian government has obtained a court warrant to detain two Binance officials for at least twelve days in the first instance, Premium Times is reporting.
While the full identities of the two Binance executives remain sketchy as of press time Wednesday night, Premium Times gathered that one of them is an American and the other a British-Pakistani.
This is following an earlier report by the Financial Times on Wednesday which revealed that Nuhu Ribadu, the national security adviser, detained two executives of the Binance crypto exchange platform and confiscated their international passports.
It is reported The meeting was expected to address outstanding issues between Binance and Nigeria, whose officials have tried publicly to blame the raging exchange rate crisis on online trading platforms.
Premium Times reports that the investigation has been consequently taken over by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) while the two executives were detained at a guest house near the Office of the National Security Adviser.
Meanwhile, indications emerged on Wednesday that Binance disabled its peer-to-peer function for Nigerian users on its platform. More popularly known as P2P, the platform allows users, buyers and sellers to trade without third-party interference and became popular among Nigerians when the administration of former President Muhammadu Buhari banned cryptocurrency in 2021. With the disabling of the P2P platform for Nigerian users, it remains unclear whether Nigerians would still be able to trade on the Binance platform.
