Nigeria chooses CBDC specialist Bitt to launch eNaria in October 2021
Bitt won the bidding to become technical partner in part thanks to its work on the development and launch of the Eastern Caribbean Central Bank CBDC’s pilot earlier this year.
The Central Bank of Nigeria has picked Bitt as the technical partner for its eNaria digital currency project. The pilot is scheduled to start in October 2021.
This won’t be Bitt’s first rodeo as the CBDC specialist is behind the first central bank digital currency going live, Eastern Caribbean’s DCash.
DCash was developed in partnership with Bitt Inc for over two years. In 2019, the Eastern Caribbean Central Bank (ECCB) and the Barbados-based fintech company signed a contract to conduct a blockchain-issued central bank digital currency (CBDC) pilot within the Eastern Caribbean Currency Union (ECCU).
In April, the jurisdiction went live with the pilot in the ECCU’s many islands: Anguilla, Antigua and Barbuda, Dominica, Grenada, Montserrat, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Lucia, and St. Vincent and the Grenadines.
The product launch came five years after Bitt announcing a $16 million investment from Overstock to support digital currency innovation in Barbados.
In late February 2016, Bitt launched a mobile wallet that used the Bitcoin Blockchain to keep track of a digitized version of the Barbadian dollar with the full backing of the Central Bank of Barbados.
Last week, Singapore’s regulator MAS has announced the 15 finalists of its retail CBDC challenge. Bitt is among a list of top financial and technology firms, including ANZ, Citibank, cLabs, Consensys, Extolabs, Giesecke+Devrient advance52, HSBC, IBM, IDEMIA, Criteo, IOG Singapore, Soramitsu, Standard Chartered Bank, and Xfers.
Nigeria plans to launch digital currency eNaria for cheaper and faster cross-border trade, financial inclusion, and tax collection
Nigeria’s CBDC plan is part of its Project Giant Banner launched in 2017. The central bank’s digital currency, eNaria, is intended to lead to better cross-border trade, financial inclusion, cheaper and faster remittance inflows, easier targeted social interventions, as well as improvements in monetary policy effectiveness, payment systems efficiency, and tax collection.
Bitt won the bidding to become technical partner in part thanks to its work on the development and launch of the Eastern Caribbean Central Bank CBDC’s pilot earlier this year.
The central bank’s CBDC project spells out 5 stages for the rollout of the digital currency with the first stage being all about creation, issuing, and the destruction of the currency.
The second stage concerns licensed financial firms and their handling of the digital currency in terms of their monitoring activity such as their anti-money laundering processes.
The third stage would begin as the digital currency begins to circulate among the users and the merchants and the businesses would then be needed to provide low-cost payments software.
The final stage would be more concerned about the rollout procedures, feedback, security measures, privacy, etc. and if and when the digital currency reaches this stage, it would mean that the rollout has been complete and successful as well.
Nigeria has recently banned all crypto-related transactions within the country.
