The rate we pay for USDT, and where that number comes from
Most places selling crypto for naira in Nigeria show you a price and leave you to guess how it was built. Ours is published: one sell rate per coin, set by our desk, shown on the home page and in the calculator before you send anything, and it is the same figure the payout is computed from.
It is worth being specific about what that rules out, because this is where money quietly goes missing elsewhere. We do not take a public market price and apply an invisible spread to it at the moment you press sell. We do not quote one number on the website and a different one in the app. And when our rate source is unavailable, the calculator says so instead of falling back to a figure from last week — a stale rate shown confidently is the most expensive kind of wrong.
What you can sell, and what changes the number
USDT is the volume trade and the one most people arrive for. USDC, BTC, ETH and the rest of the published list are quoted the same way: a per-coin dollar value and a naira-per-dollar rate, both from the same publish, so the arithmetic is checkable rather than magic.
Volume matters. Larger sells price better, and the tiers are published rather than negotiated in a chat where whoever argues hardest wins. If you are moving a meaningful amount, the tier you land in is visible before you commit.
- Sell USDT for naira — the most traded pair in the country
- Sell Bitcoin for naira
- Every coin we buy, with today's rate
- Work out exactly what you would receive
No bank account? That is the point
FirstFlip was built for people who do not have, or do not want to use, the traditional route. There is no BVN wall in front of a sell, no domiciliary account, and no card anywhere in the flow. Naira lands in the bank you choose — GTB, Access, OPay, Kuda, PalmPay, Moniepoint and the rest — and the crypto side never touches a card network.
For anyone holding stablecoins as savings rather than as a trade, that is the practical difference: your balance is spendable in naira in minutes, not after a week of moving it between apps that each take a cut.
Why our rate moves, and why that is not a trick
A naira rate is a price for dollars, and the price of dollars in Nigeria changes. Anyone promising a fixed rate for the week is either pricing far enough below the market to absorb the risk, or is going to revise it when it moves against them. Ours is published fresh and dated, and the honest version of "our rate is good" is that you can check it against anyone else's in about ten seconds.
What we do commit to is that the figure on screen is the figure you get, and that a rate we cannot source is shown as unavailable rather than guessed.
Be told when the rate moves, instead of checking
Rates move during the day. Rather than refreshing a page, join the FirstFlip Telegram channel and turn notifications on — every rate update is posted there as it happens, which means the moment the naira number improves you know, whether or not you were looking. Traders holding for a better print use it as a ticker; everyone else uses it to avoid selling on a bad hour.
There is also a community group if you would rather ask people than read a feed.
How a sell actually runs
Open the app, choose the coin, enter the amount, and read the naira figure and the rate it was computed at. Send to the address shown, and the payout goes to your bank once the transaction confirms. Confirmation time is the network's, not ours, and we do not claim to beat it.
If anything about a trade looks wrong, the desk is on WhatsApp with the order in front of them. A sell that has gone sideways is a conversation, not a support ticket queue.
