After a proposal to jail Ponzi operators, Nigerian lawmakers have been urged to consider regulating the cryptocurrency industry.

Senator Ihenyen, the president of the Nigerian Blockchain Association, has urged the country's politicians to consider developing rules to govern the crypto industry, since they are presently working on rewriting the country's securities law.

Senator Ihenyen, the chairman of a Nigerian blockchain advocacy group, has encouraged Nigerian lawmakers to consider developing a legislation to control the cryptocurrency industry as the country's parliamentarians debate a bill that proposes a ten-year prison sentence for operators of Ponzi schemes. "An unregulated crypto space is not in anyone's best interest," he asserted.

While the proposed measure does not explicitly identify or allude to digital currencies, crypto Ponzi schemes are included in what the lawmakers refer to as "prohibited schemes," according to Ihenyen, who is also the president of the Stakeholders in Blockchain Technology Association of Nigeria (SIBAN).

Following reports that Nigerian lawmakers had passed a bill repealing and re-enacting the country's Capital Markets, Investment, and Securities Act for a second reading, the leader of SIBAN made his views. In a Premium Times piece, Ibrahim Babangida, one of the lawmakers driving the charge to modify the law, explains why it needs to be modified. He stated, "

The bill outlaws Ponzi/Pyramid Schemes, as well as other illicit investment schemes, and imposes a minimum 10-year prison sentence on anyone who promote them.

In addition to a prison sentence, lawmakers want the Nigeria Securities and Exchange Commission to have the authority to shut down Ponzi schemes under the new law. The legislators also claim that the current law is incompatible with contemporary trends in capital market regulation, hence the need to revamp the act.

The majority of alleged crypto ponzi schemes have nothing to do with digital currencies.

Meanwhile, Ihenyen told Bitcoin.com News that, despite the fact that so-called crypto Ponzi schemes have dominated headlines, some of these investments turned out to have nothing to do with cryptocurrency. He stated:

The tricky part about most so-called crypto Ponzi schemes, as I must point out, is that many of these so-called 'crypto ponzis' have nothing to do with crypto, other than the fact that crypto was used to collect funds from unsuspecting participants, just as bad actors could have used fiat currencies.

In instances when crypto is actually involved, if such crypto is not a scam or scam-coin, then "you find that it is often not the crypto invested  that failed." Instead, it is the promoters or marketers that misappropriate participants' funds or simply vanish, leading the investment to collapse, Ihenyen said.

"As long as this [new law] strives to protect investors and consumers, it is welcomed," the SIBAN president said.