Central Bank of Nigeria Sends Guidelines to Banks on CBDC Project e-Naira

Central Bank of Nigeria Sends Guidelines to Banks on CBDC Project e-Naira

The Nigerian central bank seeks to make e-Naira a legal tender for the country if tests are successful.

The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) has drafted a series of guidelines addressing domestic banks about the Nigerian central bank digital currency (CBDC) project, e-Naira. According to Nairametrics, the document is aimed to detail the design and the operational structure of the coin, which is reportedly intended to be a legal tender in Nigeria.

As expected, the CBDC project will be deployed in five stages: Monetary Authority Suite, Financial Institution Suite, eGovernment Suite, Merchants Suite, and Retail Consumer Suite. Across all the paths detailed by the CBN, elements such as Know Your Customer (KYC) systems, cloud servers stability, merchants and consumers testing, among others, will be assessed to check the e-Naira adoption feasibility in Nigeria.

That said, the central bank also intends to set a transaction cost performed through e-Naira wallets once tests were performed. In addition, to allow the participation of the Nigerians, the CBN will send invitation codes for onboarding a selected group of people to test e-Naira payments through domestic banks. “As a National Critical Infrastructure, the e-naira system will be subject to comprehensive security checks, all data and personally identifiable information (PII) will be kept off the ledger and will not be stored on the ledger,” the report noted.

One of the stages contemplated in the e-Naira testing, the Merchants Suite, aims to provide point-of-sales and remote payment solutions to arrange the CBDC transactions and the proper analysis for compliance purposes.

Ghana Also Joining the CBDC Bandwagon

Other African countries have also been advancing towards adopting CBDC by deploying pilots or arranging partnerships for the purpose.

Finance Magnates reported recently that the Bank of Ghana inked a deal with Giesecke+Devrient (G+D), a German finance company, to conduct a pilot for its central bank digital currency (CBDC) in the country. The German firm will provide technical support to develop solutions for launching a future CBDC for Ghana.