DIGITAL ASSETS, CRYPTOCURRENCY PLATFORMS AND TAX REVENUE MOBILISATION IN NIGERIA: ASSESSING THE OPPORTUNITIES AND CHALLENGES UNDER THE NIGERIA TAX ACT 2025

Abstract

The rapid expansion of digital assets and cryptocurrency platforms has transformed the structure of financial and commercial transactions globally and created new opportunities and challenges for domestic revenue mobilisation. Nigeria occupies a significant position within the global digital-asset economy, with cryptocurrency increasingly used for investment, remittances, cross-border transactions, payments, savings and entrepreneurial activities. While this expansion creates a potentially significant tax base, the borderless, decentralised, pseudonymous and technologically complex nature of digital assets presents substantial challenges for tax identification, valuation, reporting, compliance monitoring, audit and enforcement. This paper examines the implications of digital assets and cryptocurrency platforms for tax revenue mobilisation in Nigeria, with particular emphasis on the Nigeria Tax Act 2025 and the emerging administrative and regulatory framework for virtual assets. The study adopts a qualitative doctrinal and secondary-data research design. It analyses relevant Nigerian tax legislation, regulatory materials, official publications and international literature on cryptocurrency taxation and digital-asset regulation. The paper finds that digital assets can contribute to public revenue through taxation of taxable gains, business income, corporate profits, qualifying services, withholding mechanisms, stamp duties and regulatory formalisation. Cryptocurrency platforms can also become important third-party sources of taxpayer and transaction information. However, significant challenges remain, including pseudonymous transactions, offshore exchanges, peer-to-peer trading, decentralised finance, valuation uncertainty, cross-border transactions, inadequate specialist tax-investigation capacity and the possibility that excessive taxation may encourage migration from regulated platforms to informal or offshore channels. The paper argues that the success of Nigeria's digital-asset tax regime will depend less on the imposition of tax obligations alone and more on the development of an integrated digital tax-intelligence architecture based on blockchain analytics, automated reporting, taxpayer identification, artificial intelligence, inter-agency information sharing and international cooperation. The paper recommends the establishment of a specialised Digital Asset Tax and Intelligence Unit within the Nigeria Revenue Service, development of a national blockchain tax-intelligence platform, mandatory standardised reporting by regulated virtual-asset service providers, stronger SEC–NRS data integration, specialised training for tax investigators and adoption of a risk-based rather than purely transaction-based approach to cryptocurrency taxation.