I understand that what I am about to explain will earn me insults from a selected few individuals because the same culprits are active here on Nairaland, so I am ready for that as well.
If you go to Binance P2P, there is a heavy manipulation going on there, and from my deductions, most of the big Binance P2P Merchants are united in carrying out this manipulation. Some of them even have over 2 Million dollars worth of USDT in their Binance P2P Funding which begs the question whether these people are truly Nigerians or probably foreigners making money from destroying the Nigerian economy.
Many people might not understand the strategy these merchants use, therefore, I will try to break it down.
This is how the manipulation works:
1. Lets assume that the Naira to Dollar is currently exchanging at the Parallel market for 1,500 Naira. On Binance P2P, the group of Merchants will create multiple fake ads claiming that they will buy your USDT for 1,700 Naira(way above the parallel market price). I call these ads “fake” because they will set a minimum limit above 5Million naira, which means if you want to sell your USDT to them at this exorbitant rate that they created, you must be selling a usdt value worth over 5Million Naira at once. This strategy works in filtering out majority of average Nigerians that want to sell their USDT to these Merchants. Meaning these fake ads will remain at the top of the p2p “sell” section for as long as these group of Merchants want it to remain. And if by chance someone who has enough USDT to meet the minimum limit decides to sell to these merchants, they will simply cancel the trade, and create another ad.
2. Now because these group of merchants have filled the P2P “sell” section with these fake ads claiming to buy your USDT at an exorbitant rate of 1,700 NGN, they have automatically shifted the P2P price of Naira to USD to 1,700 Naira, and now they will be selling their USDT to the public under the “buy” section above 1,700 Naira. Now – unlike the fake ads they created with a minimum limit that is above 5Million Naira to discourage sellers for selling to them at this high rate – when they are selling their USDT at this already manipulated price, you will find limit as low as 4,000 Naira because they want to sell to the Public at the exorbitant price they created.
Binance P2P is the new AbokiFx where BDC operators get their current price of Dollar from. The fake price originating from there is in turn used by the BDC operators to set their Dollar selling prices even without any corresponding demand. But the interesting part is that these BDC operators won’t buy from you at any rate close to the exorbitant price they are selling the dollar to you.
Here in Benin city, even though the parallel market price of Naira is above 1,600 Naira, the Abokis hardly buy your dollar for above 1,500 Naira but they will sell to you only above 1,700 Naira.
Some people might argue that if Binance is to blame, how come the official exchange rate is now above 1,500NGN to 1 USD? The answer to that is simple. Each time the rate in the Parallel market moves up, the CBN is forced to also adjust official rates upwards in order to close the gap between both windows or else the black market rate will be too wide that it will create an irresistible opportunity for round-tripping.
There is a huge rot in the entire BDC system in Nigeria that I don’t think this CBN governor has any idea how deep it really goes.