Since its debut in October of last year, Nigeria’s central bank’s digital currency (CBDC), the eNaira, has been utilized to transact business totaling 4 billion Naira ($9.3 million).
eNaira app has been downloaded 840,000 times, and there are currently roughly 270,000 active wallets, according to Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) Governor Godwin Emefiele, who hailed the number and worth of transactions on the platform as “amazing” in a speech recently.
With a gross domestic product of roughly $430 billion and a population of about 200 million, Nigeria is the biggest economy in Africa.
Nevertheless, 59 million individuals are thought to be among the estimated 40% of people who lack a bank account, a problem that the CBN plans to address with the CBDC. In the second stage, the bank hopes to convince 8 million more consumers to begin utilizing the eNaira platform.
Both banked and unbanked Nigerians will be capable of opening an eNaira wallet simply by dialing a four-digit code on their mobile phones starting next week, according to Emefiele.
Nigeria followed the Bahamas and the Eastern Caribbean Central Bank as the first nations in the world to launch national digital currencies, becoming the first nation in Africa to do so.
The CBN ordered banks to shut down any accounts with cryptocurrency transactions in the months before the eNaira was introduced in an effort to discourage the general population from using cryptocurrencies.
The CBN governor claimed that 33 banks had been effectively linked into the eNaira platform, with the apex bank effectively minting N500m for the program’s launch.
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