Nigeria’s Central Bank governor, Mr Godwin Emefiele, said the value of transactions on the country’s digital currency, the eNaira, has hit N8 billion.
Daily Trust reports that President Muhammadu Buhari launched the digital currency in October 2021.
Speaking in Abuja yesterday at 28th Edition of the Annual In-house Executive Seminar tagged “Digitalisation of Money and Monetary Policy in Nigeria” held at the Transcorp Hilton, Abuja, November 2 executive seminar in Abuja, Emefiele said the eNaira has been globally acclaimed as a success story.
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The governor was represented at the event by Aishah Ahmad, CBN deputy governor in charge of financial system stability.
Emefiele said, “Since its launch, a total of N8 billion, consisting of over 700,000 transactions, has passed through the eNaira platform.
“As part of the CBN’s effort to further integrate and broaden the usage of the eNaira, it was assigned an Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD) code, enabling payments by simply dialing ‘*997#’ on a mobile phone.
“I am proud to announce to you today that the eNaira has been attracting accolades across the globe as a monumental success.
“It topped the charts on retail CBDCs projects globally, as at April (PwC, 2022) and several central banks across the globe have been requesting for our success template on the eNaira.”
He added that as part of the CBN’s digitisation drive, the apex bank had taken transformational steps in entrenching a culture of “big data” and data analytics as tools for effective policy-making.
“To this end, the CBN Data Architecture Project (CeDAP), code-named “Project OXYGEN” was commissioned, with the objectives of providing a repository of a variety of data from different sources,” he said.
Also speaking at the event, Kingsley Obiora, deputy governor, economic policy, CBN, said the eNaira platform has so far recorded 927,000 downloads, and 317,560 activated consumer wallets with 33 banks fully integrated and live on the platform.