Quidax vs Luno: which should you use in Nigeria?

On the screen most people actually use, Luno charges 2% to buy or sell crypto and Quidax charges nothing on its instant swap. Open the order book inside either app and both come down to about 0.1%. So the cheaper app is Quidax, Daya Coins or Luno depending on which screen you use, not on which app you pick.

Two terms do most of the work here. An instant swap or instant buy is the simple screen where you tap in an amount and the app hands you a price. An order book is the trading screen where you can see what other people are offering, take one of those offers, or post your own at a price you choose. The order book is cheaper in both apps, and most people never open it.

Daya Coins charges no buy fee, no sell fee, no withdrawal fee and no network fee on your side, against 2% on Luno's instant buy and 0.1% on Quidax's order book. If you want the wider picture first, our guide to buying and selling stablecoins in Nigeria covers how these apps make money and what to check before you move any.

Which is cheaper, Quidax or Luno?

Quidax is cheaper on the screen most people use. Quidax states no fee on its instant swap, where Luno charges 2% to buy and 2% to sell. On the order book the two are level for a taker at 0.1%, and Luno is actually cheaper for a maker on stablecoin pairs, because it pays you rather than charging you.

A maker is someone who posts an offer and waits for it to be filled. A taker is someone who accepts an offer that's already sitting there. The side you're on changes the price, so a fee quoted without its side doesn't tell you much.

The gap between the two screens is worth more than the gap between the two apps. On a ₦500,000 buy, 2% is ₦10,000 and 0.1% is ₦500. That's twenty times the cost for the same coin, decided by which part of the app you tapped. Our comparison of Busha and Quidax makes the same point about a third app.

What does each one cost to move naira in and out?

Quidax charges nothing to pay naira in and ₦200 flat to take naira out, plus the ₦50 government stamp duty that applies to withdrawals of ₦10,000 and above. Luno's own pages give three different naira withdrawal figures and two different deposit figures, so check what the app quotes you before you confirm a withdrawal.

Here's what Luno publishes, as at 20 October 2026. None of these pages carries a date, so there's no way to tell which is newest:

• ₦300 excluding VAT, in the fee table on Luno's Nigeria fees and limits page.
• ₦500 per withdrawal excluding VAT, in the "More info" note further down that same page.
• 2% capped at ₦2,000 on withdrawals under ₦5 million, and capped at ₦3,000 above it, in Luno's separate article on withdrawing through Flutterwave.

On a ₦100,000 withdrawal those three readings come to ₦300, ₦500 and ₦2,000. The deposit side splits the same way: the fee table says ₦150 flat with a ₦150 million ceiling, and the Flutterwave article says 2% capped at ₦1,200 with a ₦50 million ceiling and a ₦500 minimum. Luno also notes that VAT comes out of the amount you receive, so the figure you see quoted is never quite the final cost.

What is the smallest amount you can buy on each?

Luno publishes a ₦50 minimum on an instant buy and a ₦500 minimum naira deposit. Quidax gives no naira minimum for buying, selling or withdrawing anywhere on its site or help centre. Daya Coins has no minimum at all, which its own page says outright.

Luno also publishes per-coin minimums, so you can see before you start whether the amount you have in mind will go through. The smallest buy is 0.000025 BTC, 0.001 ETH or 1 USDT. Bundles, which are Luno's ready-made baskets of coins, start at ₦2,500. The only minimum Quidax publishes anywhere is 5 USDT, and that's for its Earn product rather than for buying.

Can you take your coins off the platform?

Both apps let you send crypto to an outside wallet, and they price it very differently. Quidax prints a fixed send fee for 34 coins, so you can work out the cost before you move anything. Luno charges a fee that moves with network conditions and publishes no schedule, with one exception at 0.03% for XRP.

Quidax's fee table also lists a further 48 coins as "Trade only", with no send fee against any of them. Quidax doesn't explain that label in prose anywhere, so what you can say with confidence is only what the table shows: those 48 have no send fee listed, and the 34 that do are the ones with a price you can check in advance. Pepe, Arbitrum, NEAR, Render and Jupiter are all in the Trade only group. If moving a coin to your own wallet matters to you, look it up in that table before you buy.

Luno's send limits run on verification level rather than on coin, at roughly $2,400 a day at the first level and $120,000 a day at the third. If you put a coin on the wrong network, our guide on what happens when USDT goes to the wrong chain covers what you can and can't recover.

Where does Daya Coins fit?

Daya Coins is for someone who wants to buy and sell from a naira balance without thinking about which screen is cheaper. You buy from your own Daya naira account, there's no peer-to-peer and no minimum, and when you sell, the naira goes out to a Nigerian bank account. Its page states no buy fee, no sell fee, no withdrawal fee and no network fee on your side, and says plainly that Daya makes its money on the spread built into the rate you see.

Where Daya Coins is the stronger pick:

• You want one price on one screen. There's no cheaper screen hidden behind the simple one.
• You're buying memecoins or a token that's just launched. You can buy any token by pasting its contract address or a DexScreener link, which neither Quidax nor Luno offers. Check the address against the project's own channel first, because anyone can create a token with a familiar name.
• You're selling and want naira in your bank the same day, without posting an advert or haggling with a stranger.

Where it isn't the pick. If you want to set your own price and wait, Quidax's order book and Luno's exchange both let you post a limit order and Daya Coins doesn't. If you want US shares or ready-made baskets alongside your crypto, Luno sells both inside the same app. And if you're moving more than about $5,000 at a time, you want an order book rather than any instant screen, which is what Daya Pro is built for at 0% on the taker side and 0.05% on the maker side.

Can you still trade naira with another person on either one?

Neither app has peer-to-peer trading. Quidax discontinued its P2P service effective 23 January 2026, closed merchant adverts on 14 January, and moved whatever was left in P2P wallets into customers' Spot wallets. Luno has never run a peer-to-peer market for Nigerian customers.

Quidax's own notice points displaced users to instant swap first and the order book second. That ordering matters, because instant swap is the route whose cost Quidax never quantifies. Quidax says there's no fee on a swap and that you see the value before you confirm, which leaves the cost inside the price rather than on a fee line. If you came from P2P for the prices, the order book is the closer match. Our piece on why the USDT/NGN rate you're quoted is often wrong explains what to watch for.

Which one pays you to hold crypto, and what does it actually pay?

Both apps pay you to leave crypto with them, and both are hard to price. Luno advertises up to 11% a year on staking, and its Nigeria fee page shows that Luno keeps a cut of the rewards before you see them. Quidax advertises up to 10% a year on its homepage and 4.5% a year in its help centre.

Luno's service fee on staking rewards, from its own fee page: 20% on ADA, 35% on DOT, NEAR, SOL and AVAX, and 40% on ATOM. So the advertised rate is before Luno's share, and on a coin at the 40% line a headline 10% is 6% to you. Luno charges nothing to stake or unstake.

Quidax Earn is USDT only, starts at 5 USDT and has no lock-up, so you can move funds back to your main wallet without losing what you've accrued. The two rates on Quidax's own pages are 10% a year and 4.5% a year, and nothing on either page reconciles them. Its homepage also advertises Fixed plans, while the most recently dated of its help articles, updated on 24 September 2026, says Fixed Earn isn't available yet. Treat the higher number as a rate you can't rely on until the app quotes it to you.

Are Quidax and Luno licensed by the SEC in Nigeria?

Neither holds a full licence. Both sit inside the SEC's Accelerated Regulatory Incubation Programme, where a firm gets what the SEC calls an approval in principle. In the SEC's own words, that approval "is not a final licence and remains conditional on the entity's continued compliance with all applicable regulatory, operational, and supervisory obligations".

The complication is that the SEC publishes two things that disagree with each other, and the one most people check is the older one:

1. The SEC's register of fintech operators is stamped "Published: May 25, 2025" and lists exactly two firms under the programme, Busha and Quidax. Luno isn't on it.
2. The SEC's own circular of 2 July 2026 names seven more firms admitted to the programme, and "Luno Fintech Nigeria Limited" is the second on that list. Two more were added days later, taking the total to nine.

So a Nigerian who follows the usual advice and checks the register would conclude that Luno has no approval, and would be wrong by sixteen months. Quidax's own homepage doesn't help either: the heading says it's "licensed by the Securities and Exchange Commission of Nigeria" and the sentence underneath says it holds a "provisional Digital Assets Exchange license". Those aren't the same thing, and the second one is the accurate one.

Whichever app you're using, look it up on the SEC's register and on the SEC's circulars page rather than on the company's marketing site, and read an approval in principle as what it is. Our piece on what the rules actually say about crypto in Nigeria goes through the whole picture.

What can you do on one app that you can't on the other?

The fee tables are close enough that the products decide it for most people. Luno is the broader investing app and Quidax is the broader crypto app.

Only on Luno:

• Tokenised US shares and ETFs, at 2% a trade from ₦50.
• Bundles, which are ready-made baskets of coins, at 1% to buy, 1% to sell and 2% a year to rebalance.
• Prediction markets, priced between 0.03% and 3% to buy.
• Staking across several coins, with the service fees above.
• Voucher deposits, as well as bank transfers.

Only on Quidax:

• Free sends to another Quidax user by email or phone number.
• A published per-coin send fee you can check before you move anything.
• Fiat rails beyond the naira, in Ghanaian cedis, Kenyan shillings and the CFA franc.
• A launchpad for new token sales, and its own QDX token.

Daya Coins sits across the middle of that: no peer-to-peer, no minimum, naira out to a Nigerian bank, and any token buyable by contract address. It doesn't sell shares or run prediction markets.

So which should you use?

Pick on what you're trying to do rather than on the headline fee, because both apps have a cheap screen and an expensive one.

• You want US shares and crypto in one app: Luno, which is the only one of the three that sells both.
• You want to set your own price and wait for a fill: Quidax's order book, or Luno's exchange if you're a maker on USDT/NGN and want the rebate.
• You want one simple screen and no second price hidden behind it: Daya Coins, which charges nothing on your side and puts its cost in the rate.
• You want to buy a token that isn't listed anywhere yet: Daya Coins, by contract address.
• You're moving $5,000 or more at a time: an order book rather than any instant screen.

Whichever you choose, do the one check that matters more than any fee table. Quote the same buy in two apps at the same moment and compare the naira each one actually asks for, because the price you're shown carries a margin that no fee page prints. A 2% fee on ₦500,000 is ₦10,000, and every further one per cent of difference between two apps' rates on that same ₦500,000 is another ₦5,000.