How virtual asset businesses file under the new NRS guidelines
The Nigeria Revenue Service published its guidelines on the taxation of virtual assets on 31 July 2026. Here is what an exchange, a P2P marketplace or any business holding crypto now has to show — and how BizBrada gets the return out of your own trade records.
16 August 2026 · 5 min read · The BizBrada team
For years the honest answer to "how is crypto taxed in Nigeria?" was: nobody had written it down properly. That ended on 31 July 2026, when the Nigeria Revenue Service published its guidelines on the taxation of virtual assets. The rules were always coming. Now they are on paper, and they are specific about what a return must contain.
This piece is for the businesses those guidelines land on: exchanges, peer-to-peer marketplaces, brokers, custodians, and ordinary companies that simply hold coin or accept it from customers. No panic, no jargon. What is being asked, and what to do about it this week.
What actually changed
Virtual assets are treated as property, not as money. That single sentence does most of the work. It means a disposal is a taxable event — and a disposal is not only selling for Naira. Swapping one coin for another is a disposal. Spending coin on goods or services is a disposal. Paying a supplier in coin is a disposal.
It also means the gain has to be measured in Naira, at the rate that applied on the day the trade happened, not the rate on the day you sat down to do your books. And a service provider — an exchange or a marketplace — carries obligations for its own margin and fees on top of whatever its users owe.
The three things people get wrong
- Thinking only a coin-to-Naira sale counts. A coin-to-coin swap is a disposal too.
- Converting the whole year at one rate. Each disposal is measured at its own day's rate.
- Keeping the exchange's CSV as the only record. It has the trades, not the Naira position or the audit trail.
Who this lands on
- Exchanges and brokers — your own trading income, your fees, and your reporting duties as a service provider.
- P2P marketplaces — escrow fees, commissions and the volume that passes through your platform.
- Custodians and wallet providers — holdings you carry on behalf of other people, kept clearly apart from your own.
- Any business holding or accepting virtual assets — the shop paid in USDT, the consultancy invoicing abroad in coin, the company holding treasury in Bitcoin.
If you are in the last group, you are still in scope. There is no minimum below which a disposal stops being a disposal. The size of the business changes the size of the number, not whether the record has to exist.
What a return has to show
Every disposal
Sale, swap or spend — each one, with its date
In Naira
Cost and proceeds at the rate on the day of the trade
Holdings
What you still hold at the end of the period
A trail
Where each figure came from, if you are asked
That last one is the quiet difference between a return that survives a question and one that does not. A number on its own is an assertion. A number with the trade behind it, the rate used, and the date it was recorded is an answer.
How BizBrada does it
You do not compute any of this by hand. You bring your trades in, and the asset book does the rest.
Bring the trades in
Upload the statement your exchange or wallet gives you, or let your own system write trades straight in through the API. Lines you have already brought in are recognised and not counted twice.
Naira, on the day
Each acquisition and each disposal is converted at the rate that applied on its own date, and that rate is frozen on the record. Re-running the report next quarter gives the same figure it gave today.
The asset book keeps the position
Holdings per asset, cost carried forward, gains and losses realised in the period — kept as you go, not reconstructed at year end.
Read the reconciliation
The virtual asset reconciliation report lines your statement up against your book, shows what agrees, and shows what still needs a human eye before anything is filed.
Every figure keeps its trail
Each line carries where it came from, who touched it and when. Any figure in the return can be opened back to the trade underneath it.
The work is not the arithmetic. The work is having records good enough that the arithmetic is only arithmetic.
Filing it: draft, certify, submit
When the book is clean, BizBrada prepares the return from your own records. You read it, you certify it, and it goes forward — it is your return, and nothing is submitted in your name without you saying so.
If you would rather a person carried it, the assisted route hands the draft to a verified licensed accountant in our partner network, matched to someone who has handled virtual asset returns before. They review, they raise anything that looks wrong, and they file. You still certify. You still see everything.
If you are an exchange or a marketplace
Do not ask your team to export CSVs every month. The BizBrada API lets your platform write trades, fees and settlements into its books as they happen, and read the tax position back into your own dashboard. Every create and update takes an idempotency key, so a retry after a timeout never writes the trade twice.
API access is included on Scale and available as an add-on on Growth. The full endpoint reference, with example requests and a keyless sandbox to try, is on the developers page.
What to do this week
- Pull the full statement from every exchange and wallet the business uses — not just the busy one.
- Write down which wallets are the business's and which are personal. Mixed wallets are the single hardest thing to unpick later.
- Bring one period in and read the reconciliation. It will show you the gaps while there is still time to close them.
- Decide who certifies the return: you, your accountant, or a partner from our network.
The guidelines are not a trap. They are a specification. Once your records meet it, filing is a Tuesday afternoon, not a crisis.