"Approval in principle" is not a licence
Nigeria has been admitting crypto firms in batches all year, and the announcements are being marketed as licences. The regulator says in writing that they are not.
Through July and August, Nigeria's securities regulator admitted a series of crypto firms into its accelerated regulatory incubation programme, announcing them in batches of two to seven at a time. Within days, several of those firms were describing themselves as licensed.
The regulator's own wording is narrower, and it is worth reading twice: an approval in principle confirms that an entity has satisfied the admission requirements for the programme — it is not a final licence and remains conditional.
What the difference actually is
An approval in principle is permission to operate inside a supervised sandbox, under conditions, while the regulator watches. A full registration is the end of that process. Between the two sits everything that can still go wrong: conditions not met, capital requirements raised, the programme itself redesigned.
For somebody holding a balance, the practical gap is this. Sandbox admission says the regulator knows the firm exists and has looked at its paperwork. It does not say the firm is solvent, that client assets are segregated, or that anyone will compensate you if it fails.
The marketing tell
Watch for "regulated by" and "SEC-approved" without the word provisional, in principle or incubation anywhere nearby. A firm that holds an approval in principle and says so plainly is behaving well. One that rounds it up to a licence has told you something about itself before you have deposited anything.
Checking it yourself takes two minutes
There is no consolidated list of registered digital asset firms in Nigeria — admissions are announced in circulars, so checking means reading through them rather than searching a register. We have put the circulars index, and the equivalent for every other country we cover, on the registers page, with a sentence for each one about what it does and does not prove.
This is not a Nigerian peculiarity. Sandbox and provisional regimes exist in a dozen countries, and in every one of them the same rounding-up happens in marketing. The habit worth building is mechanical: find the regulator's own page, find the firm's name on it, and read what the status is called.
Related: what to do if the platform freezes your account, and the fourteen questions to run through before you send anything anywhere.