Bitcoin latest: Nigeria Central Bank warns cryptocurrency is a ‘gamble’.

The central-bank administrator of Nigeria, where bitcoin trade grew the most in Africa last year, pronounced investing in the cryptocurrency as a “gamble” and hinted it might have to be regulated.

“Cryptocurrency or bitcoin is like a gamble, and there is a need for everybody to be very careful,” Central Bank of Nigeria Gov Godwin Emefiele pronounced in an talk on Wednesday at his bureau in the capital, Abuja.

“We can't as a executive bank give support to situations” where people risk assets to “gamble,” he said.

Emefiele is the latest among regulators globally to demonstrate regard about bitcoin, one of the most renouned cryptocurrencies, because of high sensitivity and a notice that it facilitates crime.

In Jan 2017, the executive bank expelled a round to lenders seeking them not to use, hold, or trade practical currencies tentative “substantive law and or preference by the CBN.”

Still, direct for the digital banking is surging in West Africa’s biggest economy, with peer-to-peer exchange rising almost 1,500 per cent this year, second only to China, according to information from LocalBitcoins.

A bitcoin wipe-out would beget the biggest waste in Russia, followed by New Zealand and Nigeria, according to a news published by Citigroup in December.

Bitcoin was little altered at $11,254 by Friday morning, compared to high of $19,511 on Dec 18, according to a combination of prices gathered by Bloomberg.

Prime Minister Theresa May on Thursday promised to cruise clamping down on the cryptocurrency. Central banks in China and Russia have stopped local-exchange trade of bitcoin.

“I have asked my colleagues in the investigate and monetary-policy dialect to investigate the marketplace and get to know what the issues are,” Emefiele said. The executive bank might in destiny “make some very petrify pronouncements as to the direction,” he said, but giving details.