If you are Nigerian, it’s possible you know Patricia one of the biggest, if not the biggest crypto platform in Nigeria, founded by a Nigerian youth. Patricia is so big and successful, they sponsor the biggest Nigerian Reality TV show, Big Brother Naija. They use this Big Brother Naija to create more crypto awareness by being the head sponsor of the show, this way viewers will watch a lot of crypto related ads from Patricia.
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Patricia was doing so great in Nigeria and progressing in getting new Nigerian users, everyone knew Patricia, most Bitcoin traders loved using Patricia because of the swift service, but I didn’t like using it because of their service charge. But that’s not the point, the point is, Patricia was making great progress in helping crypto adoption in Nigeria and Africa at large.
They hard a Patricia card, they also had branches in some parts in Africa, the company was doing so great and had their headquarter in Lagos Nigeria. But unfortunately the government decided to formulate a policy that restricted Patricia. The government banned all financial institutions from having crypto related transactions. Patricia helps with deposit and withdrawal of crypto into local bank accounts, that’s where Patricia makes most of its profit from. They buy cheap and sell at a higher price by taking advantage of difference in exchange rates. That is, they buy bitcoin from users at let’s say 520 naira per dollar and sell 580 naira per dollar. That 60 naira spread is their profit and they use banks for these transactions.
With the government’s restrictions, transactions will have to be placed on hold till the company finds an alternative. They wouldn’t want to use P2P because this means that they won’t make profit. You can’t compare trading crypto on Patricia to trading crypto on Binance. They started a way of still making transaction but that didn’t last for long, because am sure that the government kept they account on close watch.
CEO Of Patricia
The company couldn’t take it anymore they decided to move the company’s headquarter to Estonia a Northern European country. Once again, Nigeria has lost another gem and talent to Europe because of the country’s leaders inability of thinking about the future. While the company relocated to Europe they also did some upgrade to the Patricia app giving it more features and allowing crypto currency trading to be much more better than it used to be. Patricia has been dominating cryptocurrency transaction in Nigeria for more than 2 years, so it’s sad to see a company by a Nigerian relocate to another country for acceptance.
This way the company might build better connection in Europe and dominate so hard that the country might later start begging the company to come back to Nigeria, we have seen this happen so many times in other sectors. We have seen cases of the country not valuing potential skills until they relocate to another country. After relocating and be the best in that country while adding value to the country, Nigeria comes back begging and pleading for their return. This is possibly going to be the case for Patricia in the next 10 years.