The steady depreciation of the naira has seen many residents of Africa’s most populous nation pivot toward cryptocurrencies, even though the central bank ordered commercial lenders to stop transactions or operations in digital tokens. While there are 270,000 active users of e-naira, as many as 33.4 million Nigerians have either owned or traded cryptocurrencies, according to a report by KuCoin, a Seychelles-based crypto exchange.

Only about 45% of adults in the nation with more than 200 million people have bank accounts, according to the World Bank.