The Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), Godwin Emefiele, has said transactions on Nigeria’s digital currency app, e-Naira, have reached N4 billion since the launch of the platform in October, 2021.
Emefiele stated this in Abuja Thursday at the grand finale of the 2022 e-Naira hackathon.
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He said, “Since the launch of this great initiative, the e-Naira has reached 840,000 downloads, with about 270,000 active wallets comprising over 252,000 consumer wallets and 17,000 merchant wallets. In addition, the volume and value of transactions on the platform have been remarkable, reaching above 200,000 and N4bn respectively.”
He, however, noted that the second phase of the project had begun and was intended to drive financial inclusion by onboarding unbanked and underserved users leveraging offline channels.
He said, “Greater success is envisioned for the project with phase two expected to deliver more gains with a target of about 8,000,000 active users based on estimations using the diffusion of innovation model.”
Emefiele explained that the e-Naira hackathon recorded a sizable interest from young and innovative Nigerians with a total of 4,667 registrations comprising 4,082 male and 582 female applicants.
A Deputy Governor of the CBN, Kingsley Obiora, said there had been an explosion in e-business due to the advert of fintech.
He said, “We have seen the value of e-business grow from 393bn in 2014 to about 2.4trn now, and so if you look at this movement, you will realise that the central banks in the world are responding to yearnings of citizens, which is why citizens in 96 per cent of central banks in the are either working on digital currencies or they have done so already.”
Daniel Aweh, the Group Head, African FinTech Foundry, a technical partner, said from 5,000 applications being the highest ever in Africa, the team selected 20 finalists.
He said, “The hackathon is a platform that brings entrepreneurs, coders and product managers to solve problems and build new business models.”
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