Nigeria Central Bank Issues CBDC Guidelines to Commercial Banks: Report

Nigerian banks will be able to invite their customers to register for the African nation’s central bank digital currency (CBDC), the e-naira, according to a report by the business publication Nairametrics.

• The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) outlined design features, use cases and guidelines in a document it shared with the country’s banks as it prepares a pilot for an October launch, according to the report published on Sunday.
• The e-naira will be a non-interest-bearing CBDC, and customers won’t be charged for user-to-merchant transactions and peer-to-peer wallet transactions.
• A presentation circulating via Twitter and WhatsApp, and bearing the insignia of the CBN, said that the CBDC will have the same purchasing power as the naira.
• The presentation also indicates that the e-naira project, which is dubbed “Project Giant,” is in phase three of four phases leading up to the October pilot.
• Phase three calls for introducing banks to the project, and phase four focuses on educating customers about the digital currency.
• E-naira project participants will be involved in five ways, according to Nairametrics, with the CBN handling the issuance and distribution of the currency, while licensed financial institutions will be able to “request currency or issue stablecoins”
• The report also notes that the currency will have to comply with anti-money laundering (AML) and know-your-customer (KYC) requirements laid out by the CBN.