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President Muhammadu Buhari has, on Monday, launched the Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) eNaira with over N500m of the currency minted in Abuja.
Speaking during the event, the Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), Mr. Godwin Emefiele said that 33 banks have been fully integrated and live on the platform.
Emefiele noted that another N200 million has been issued to financial institutions.
According to him, over 2.5 million people visit the website daily, over 2,000 customers onboarded and 120 merchants successfully registered on the eNaira platform.
Immediately after the launch, Emefiele revealed that “customers who download the eNaira Speed Wallet App will be able to perform the following: onboard and create their wallet; fund their eNaira wallet from their bank account; transfer eNaira from their wallet to another wallet and make payment for purchases at registered merchant locations.”
The CBN, he said, “will continue to refine, fine-tune and upgrade the eNaira” and he assured that “Nigerians should expect to see additional functionalities in the coming months”.
Some of the additional functionalities include: accessibility and onboarding of customers without BVN and the use of the eNaira on the phone without the internet to further drive financial inclusion, making Nigeria one of the first countries in the world to deploy the CBDC via USSD on phones without relying on internet connectivity.
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Another feature that will be deployed by the eNaira is the “onboarding of revenue collection agencies to increase and simplify collections and the creation of sector- specific tokens to support the Federal Government’s social programmes and distribution of targeted welfare schemes in a bid to lift millions out of poverty by 2025”.
At the official launch of eNaira, President Buhari said that the adoption of CBDC and its underlying technology, called block chain, will boost Nigeria’s GDP by $29 billion in 10 years
The President also declared that the introduction of the eNaira would enable the government to send direct payments to citizens eligible for specific welfare programmes as well as foster cross border trade.
Read the story in details here.
