Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, will discontinue all of its naira services starting from March 8 due to regulatory troubles in Nigeria, it disclosed in an announcement on Tuesday.

The exchange will no longer support NGN deposits after March 5, with withdrawals being disabled after March 8. Naira balances in users' accounts will be automatically converted to USDT at a conversion rate of 1 USDT to ₦1,515.13 starting from March 8, 08:00 UTC.

Furthermore, Binance will delist all existing NGN spot trading pairs, including bitcoin to naira and USDT to naira, on March 7 at 03:00 UTC.

The platform will also remove naira from its Binance Convert, Binance P2P, Auto-Invest, and Binance Pay services on varying dates leading up to the discontinuation.

The news follows regulatory scrutiny that has seen the Nigerian government block the exchange’s website, arrest its executives, and demand a $10 billion fine for benefiting from illicit transactions on its platform.

Last week, in an effort seen by many to appease Nigerian regulators, Binance deactivated its peer-to-peer (P2P) market function on its mobile app for the Nigerian naira. However, these measures did not prove sufficient to safeguard the continued operations of the company within the nation.

Image Source: Binance