Key takeaways:
- The number of Africa-focused crypto exchanges that have shut down continues to grow, with Bundle Africa being the latest addition.
- The prolonged crypto winter has been unkind to many crypto businesses globally. Funding in 2022 and 2023 has gotten progressively worse compared to 2021.
- Besides the crypto winter, some exchanges have shut down due to regulatory hurdles, scams, and mounting losses.
Since the fall of the $32 billion crypto exchange, FTX, the crypto market has taken a turn for the worse. The excitement around get-rich-quick digital tokens has waned over the past eight months.
Crypto news barely makes headlines anymore, and stories of people making billions from meme coins are nowhere to be seen, leaving crypto evangelists with nothing to arm themselves with when they try to win souls for the ecosystem.
Even investors are weary of the market.
The crypto market was bullish in 2021 and investors took advantage. Total funding was valued at $37.06 billion. But by 2022, the story changed big time, funding dropped by $16 billion to $21.26 billion.
Like the rest of the world, crypto tales in Africa are also in gloomy chapters.
Crypto exchanges focused on African users have shut down, unable to survive the harsh crypto winter and regulatory hurdles that plague crypto businesses globally.
In this article, we list Africa-focused crypto exchanges that have shut down since FTX's untimely death in November 2022.
Africa-focused crypto exchanges that have shut down
LocalBitcoins
LocalBitcoins shut down in February 2023 after 10 years of operation. It is one of the earliest and most popular peer-to-peer platforms in the crypto ecosystem.
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In its announcement, LocalBitcoins said, "Regardless of our efforts to overcome challenges during the ongoing very cold crypto-winter, we have regretfully concluded that LocalBitcoins can no longer provide its Bitcoin trading service."
Paxful
Paxful, a US-based crypto exchange, shut down its operations in April 2023, with the CEO, Ray Youseff citing the closure on an unfavourable regulatory landscape.
Interestingly, the company announced that it was back online one month later. Per CoinDesk, Paxful is currently owned by a custodian, who serves as a director.
Bundle Africa
Bundle Africa is the latest exchange to close its doors to users. It announced it was shutting down exchange operations in July 2023, to focus on its P2P product, Cashlink.
While the company did not site regulatory hurdles or crypto winter has one of the reasons for the shutdown, it is not out of place to presume that might be the case.
LocalCyptos
Local cryptos shut down in October 2022, a month before the FTX collapse, but it is a worthy mention in the list of Africa-focused crypto exchanges that have collapsed.
LocalCryptos launched in October 2017 and amassed 400,000 users before it shut down five years later. Its main reasons for closing up shop are the crypto winter and the regulatory landscape.
The crypto landscape is unpredictable and no one knows how much longer the crypto winter will last, but at this rate, more crypto businesses will die out in the cold if the bulls don't rally soon.
