By Adedapo Adesanya
The Investors and Exporters (I&E) window of the foreign exchange (FX) market in Nigeria witnessed a significant surge in the value of transactions on Thursday, January 13, 2022.
Data obtained by Business Post showed that forex transactions at the market segment increased by 122.9 per cent or $95.38 million yesterday as trades worth $172.99 million were carried out compared with the $77.61 million executed a day earlier.
But despite this significant increase in FX trades, the value of the Naira to the United States Dollar remained unchanged at the close of business, trading at N416.50/$1, the same rate of the preceding session.
The availability of FX to meet the demands of customers was responsible for the stability the local currency had against its American counterpart during the session.
However, it was not a similar scenario at the interbank segment of the market, where the domestic currency depreciated against the greenback yesterday by 18 kobo or 0.04 per cent to trade at N414.79/$1 in contrast to N414.61/$1 of the previous day.
In the same vein, the Nigerian currency depreciated against the Pound Sterling by N3.72 to trade N569.29/£1 compared with the previous day’s N565.57/£1 and against the Euro, the Naira lost N3.97 to settle at N475.22/€1 versus Wednesday’s rate of N471.25/€1.
Meanwhile, at the digital currency market, the bears took firm control, causing eight of the benchmarked tokens to slide at the close of transactions on Thursday.
Ripple (XRP) depreciated by 4.6 per cent to N458.01, Cardano (ADA) closed 3.7 per cent lower to sell at N728.31, Ethereum (ETH) fell by 3.3 per cent to trade at N1,865,000.00, Litecoin (LTC) declined by 2.9 per cent to N78,259.41, Bitcoin (BTC) crashed by 1.9 per cent to N24,499,998.99, Binance Coin (BNB) recorded a 1.8 per cent fall to trade at N197,975.30, Tron (TRX) slid by 1.7 per cent to sell at N38.15, while Dash (DASH) went down by 1.1 per cent to N78,259.41.
But Dogecoin (DOGE) recorded a 5.7 per cent gain during the session to trade at N100.41, while the United States Dollar Tether (USDT) appreciated by 0.1 per cent to sell at N571.50.
Modupe Gbadeyanka