The governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) Mr. Godwin Emefiele, has announced that Africa’s first digital currency, eNaira, has hit over 905,588 downloads, showing an increase in usage by Nigerians.
What’s more
Although of the total number of downloads, only 282,600 of the wallets are currently active, the CBN Governor linked the surge in the number of users to the USSD linkage to eNaira.
- The CBN governor said, “For e-commerce, we have seen a 9.946 percent increase between July and September, and this remains very encouraging. We believe the eNaira is an alternative to you holding an analogue naira and so it is very convenient.”
By the numbers
According to the numbers released by Mr. Godwin Emefiele, at the Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) meeting on Tuesday, not only has eNaira application recorded 905,588 downloads, the digital currency transactions have exceeded $1.49 million over N3.484 billion.
- A breakdown shows: “78,115 consumer-to-bank transactions worth about N1 billion, 90,760 bank-to-customer transactions worth N945 million, 35,800 consumer-to-consumer transactions worth about N480 million, and 171,000 consumers to merchant transactions worth over N387 million.”
- CBN has created 13,136 wallets through the USSD channel.
In case you missed it
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To encourage the use of the digital currency amongst non-bank customers, CBN unveiled *997# as the Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD) code for transacting Nigeria’s digital currency, eNaira.
Remita, one of Africa’s top leading electronic payment brands, also adopted eNaira, as a payment option across its touch points back in June.