Naira Weakens by 3.32% at Official Market, Gains at P2P

By Adedapo Adesanya

The Naira depreciated against the US Dollar by 3.32 per cent or N24.53 in the Investors and Exporters (I&E) segment of the foreign exchange (FX) market on Thursday, August 31.

Pressure mounted on the Nigerian currency yesterday in the official market, weakening its value to N762.71/$1, in contrast to the previous day’s value of N738.18/$1.

The supply of forex into the market was shortened during the session, with the value of transactions going down by 49.6 per cent or $84.36 million to $85.79 million from the $170.15 million achieved in the preceding session.

Also, in the black market, the domestic currency depreciated against the Dollar yesterday by N5 to sell at N920/$1 compared with the previous trading day’s N915/$1.

However, the local currency put up a good performance against the greenback in the Peer-to-Peer (P2P) window on Thursday as it gained N2 to sell for N918/$1, in contrast to Wednesday’s closing price of N920/$1.

It was the same outcome for the Naira against the Pound Sterling at the spot market during the session as it improved by N15.08 to N959.93/£1 versus the preceding session’s N975.01/£1 but lost N9.72 against the Euro to trade at N821.61/€1 compared with the midweek session’s N811.89/€1.

In the cryptocurrency market, Bitcoin (BTC) and a host of other benchmarked currencies fell as a court in New York, US, classified popular cryptocurrencies BTC and Ethereum (ETH) as “commodities” while dismissing a proposed class action lawsuit against leading decentralized crypto exchange Uniswap.

BTC slid by 4.5 per cent to sell at $26,036.66, Ethereum (ETH) dropped 3.2 per cent to trade at $1,649.16, Litecoin (LTC) depreciated by 5.2 per cent to $63.95, Solana (SOL) shed 4.1 per cent to quote at $19.86, and Binance Coin (BNB) fell by 3.6 per cent to $215.33.

In addition, Ripple (XRP) recorded a 3.4 per cent fall to trade at $05088, Cardano (ADA) went down by 3.2 per cent to $0.2565, and Dogecoin (DOGE) declined by 3.1 per cent to $0.0637, while the US Dollar Tether (USDT) and Binance USD (BUSD) remained unchanged at $0.9996 each.