Nigeria leads Africa’s adoption of decentralized crypto wallets — Report

A report by blockchain insights firm Dune Analytics has found that Nigerian users dominate the African userbases of decentralized cryptocurrency wallet platforms such as Zerion, Trust and Metamask wallets.

In addition, while these decentralized platforms saw a large protion of their users based in Africa, their centralized counterparts such as OKX and Coinbase saw less in that regard, indicating a possible preference for the former among Africans.

The details 

• Dune Analytics said that its State of Crypto Wallets 2025 report is a narrower, Africa-beamed version of its State of Wallets 2025 report released earlier in the year.
• To gather its insights, the firm employed blockchain intelligence platform Addressable, which helped it to connect on-chain wallet addresses to off-chain markers. 
• In addition, the report mostly covers Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM)-compatible wallets and a few non-EVM wallets but which are linked to EVM addresses across 12 African countries. 

Dive in 

• For a number of decentralized wallet platforms, Africa represents their largest userbase. For example, Zerion’s African users constitute 38% of its global users, more than any other region. 

• Other wallets such as Bitget, Phantom, Sui, Trust, Rabby and Metamask wallets also boast of strong African user adoption numbers. 
• On the other hand, African users of centralized wallet providers such as OKX and Coinbase constituted less than 10% of their global total.  

This may indicate an affinity for decentralized wallets among Africa’s crypto-savvy population. 

• However, while African users make up a sizeable portion of these wallet platforms’ userbases, the continent’s transaction size recorded on these platforms are small compared to other regions. 
• This is in tandem with broader African trends where crypto transaction volumes are dominated by small, retail-sized transfers in large numbers. 
• To highlight this, while African users make up 38% of Zerion’s userbase, the transaction volume of this demographic constitutes only 17.8% of the paltform’s total transactions. 
• For Rabby Wallet, transactions initiated by its African bloc of users amounts to 5.3% of its global total. African users made less than 5% of the total transactions in all other wallets.

Which countries are leading adoption? 

• According to Dune’s findings, Nigerians make up the bulk of the African userbase of these wallet platforms. 
• For Zerion, Trust, Sui, Rabby, Metamask and Phantom wallets, Nigerian users amount to at least half of their African customers. 

• In addition, Nigeria ranks as the top country globally for user share in these wallet platforms — Zerion (37.2%), Trust Wallet (11.4%), Sui Wallet (14.4%), Rabby (13.4%), Metamask (12.7%) and Phantom (18%) 

The exceptions to this are Best Wallet, whose African userbase is dominated by South Africa (36.4%), Kenya (23.6%) and Egypt (19.3%), and Ton Wallet which boasts of an African userbase comprising of 45.2% Ethiopians. 

• On the other hand, centralized wallet platforms such as Coinbase have a more distributed list of African users. Nigeria makes up 31%, South Africa 22.4%, Egypt 13.7% and Morocco 12.3%, Dune found. 
• In terms of wallet balances, the numbers are more revealing. 
• Of the total balance of assets held by African users on Trust Wallet, Algeria-based wallets held 81.4% of funds while South Africa held 12%. 
• Despite Rabby Wallet’s userbase dominated by Nigerians, Egyptian wallets held assets amounting to 51.9% of the total African crypto stash that moved through the platform.