Celestia Labs and Kled AI Use Nigeria for Global Visibility, Then Block Its Users

Celestia Labs, a cryptocurrency infrastructure company, has temporarily blocked Nigerian residents from accessing its $5 test token giveaway, citing mass withdrawals instead of product testing. The move comes two months after Kled AI, a US-based data marketplace, removed its app from Nigerian app stores and imposed an IP ban on the entire region for similar reasons.

Mustafa Al-Bassam, the Celestia Labs co-founder and CEO, announced the decision in a post on X on Tuesday. According to the CEO, Nigeria accounted for 9,189 token bridge transactions, more than fourteen times the next-highest country, the United Kingdom, at 638. Germany, Morocco, and the Netherlands followed in the low 300s, with the United States at just 214.

Crypto faucets are a standard onboarding tool in blockchain products where a new user connects a wallet, verifies they are human, and receives a small amount of a token, usually enough to cover a transaction fee or demonstrate a feature like bridging. The token is meant to be spent inside the product to generate test activity, not withdrawn. The bridging data suggests the faucet had no real constraint between receiving the token and bridging it straight back out.

In a message on its community channel, the company praised Nigerians as “some of the most creative people in the world” and declared that “the future is Nigeria” while stating the team was “temporarily geoblocking Nigeria from the faucet out of pure respect”. Nigerians remain welcome to use the product if they deposit their own tokens.

Two months earlier, Kled AI, a US-based data marketplace that pays users for uploading content used as AI training data, removed its app from Nigerian app stores and IP-banned the entire region. Founder Avi Patel explained that after several months of uploads, the company found Nigeria had an approximately 95 percent fraud rate, with users submitting black screens, duplicate photos, and AI-generated or internet-sourced images at scale. The platform had reportedly paid out hundreds of thousands of dollars over four months before the abuse became unsustainable.

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Patel noted that Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines had fraud rates below 10 percent across a user base ten times the size. Before the ban, Kled AI had genuine traction in Nigeria, ranking among the top 100 on Apple’s App Store multiple times and pulling in more than 25,000 users.

The Nigeria’s more than 220 million people make it an attractive test market for global tech startups. Nigerian Web3 startups raised $43 million in 2025, more than double the $20 million recorded in 2024, and Nigerian builders now account for 67 percent of all active Solana developers in Africa. Since 2020, more than 110 Nigerian-founded Web3 startups have raised over $170 million. Food delivery startup Swoop, for example, is positioning Lagos as the launchpad for its continental expansion plans. Nigeria remains one of the world’s fastest-growing markets for crypto adoption and digital finance.

Some Tech observers have questioned whether the numbers tell the full story. One X user noted that the 9,189 transactions “could very well be 20-30 people doing this and could as well be people using VPN and intentionally showing Nigeria”. The same user observed that on freelance platforms like Upwork, “if you tell someone you’re in Nigeria, they stop responding”.

The pattern is becoming clear. Tech startups come to Nigeria for global visibility and user acquisition. They gain attention and traction from the country’s massive, tech-savvy population. When things go wrong, Nigeria becomes the scapegoat. When a reward is fungible, portable, and only loosely tied to actual product usage, rational users anywhere will take the exit available to them. Nigeria’s users simply did it at a scale and speed that exposed the gap faster than any other market. Yet rather than building systems that prevent abuse from the start, platforms impose blanket bans that reinforce the very stereotypes they once used to gain attention.

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