There are 270,000 active wallets and 840,000 downloads of the eNaira app.
Since it was introduced last October, the eNaira, which is Nigeria’s central bank digital currency (CBDC), has been used to make transactions worth $9.3 million, according to the country’s central bank governor.
In a speech on Thursday, Godwin Emefiele, governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), called the number and value of transactions on the platform “remarkable.” He also said that the eNaira app has been downloaded 840,000 times and has about 270,000 active wallets.
Nigeria is the largest economy in Africa, with a gross domestic product of about $430 billion and a population of about 200 million people.
It is thought, however, that about 40% of the population, or 59 million adults, do not have a bank account. This is something that the CBN wants to fix with the CBDC. In the second phase, the bank wants to get 8 million more people to use the eNaira platform.
Emefiele said that this phase would start next week when Nigerians with and without bank accounts will be able to open an eNaira wallet by dialing a four-digit code on their cell phones.
After the Bahamas did it a year earlier, Nigeria was the second country to set up a CBDC. In the months before the eNaira was released, the CBN tried to stop people from using cryptocurrencies by telling banks to close any accounts with cryptocurrency transactions.
