Naira Crashes to N622/$1 at Peer-to-Peer, N605/$1 at Black Market

By Adedapo Adesanya

The Naira is fast losing its value against the United States Dollar in the various segments of the foreign exchange (FX) market as a result of the bottlenecks end-users go through to obtain the foreign currencies amid disruption in the supply end of the chain.

At the peer-to-peer (P2P) window on Wednesday, the Nigerian currency was exchanged with the greenback at N622/$1 compared with the previous day’s rate of N615/$1, indicating a depreciation of N7 or 1.14 per cent.

At the black market, according to data sourced by Business Post, the domestic currency depreciated by N2 or 0.33 per cent to trade at N605/$1 compared with the N603/$1 it was exchanged on Tuesday.

Also, at the Investors and Exporters (I&E) segment, the Naira depreciated by 23 kobo or 0.05 per cent to N420.50/$1 in contrast to the previous day’s N420.27/$1, according to data from the FMDQ Securities Exchange.

The platform revealed that the value of FX transactions at the I&E window yesterday went down by $36.07 million or 33.4 per cent to $71.99 million from the $108.06 million reported in the preceding session.

However, the local currency strengthened against the Pound Sterling and the Euro at the interbank segment of the forex market on Wednesday as it gained N1.07 on the former to trade at N508.85/£1 compared to the previously traded rate of N509.92/£1 and appreciated against the latter by N1.72 to N437.08/€1 from the preceding session’s N438.80/€1.

Meanwhile, at the digital currency market, the bears took a back seat, with Ethereum (ETH) down by 1.1 per cent to $1,085.12, Bitcoin (BTC) down by 0.4 per cent to $20,346.44 and Dogecoin (DOGE) down by 0.3 per cent to $0.06351.

Litecoin (LTC) posted the biggest gain as its value rose by 5.9 per cent to $54.95, TerraClassicUSD (USTC) grew by 4.9 per cent to $0.0084, Solana (SOL) recorded a 3.3 per cent jump to trade at $35.88, Binance Coin (BNB) appreciated by 1.9 per cent to trade at $220.61, Ripple (XRP) improved by 0.7 per cent to trade at $0.3265, Cardano (ADA) leapt by 0.4 per cent to $0.4718, while the US Dollar Tether (USDT) climbed higher by 0.01 per cent to $0.9991.