Nigeria’s digital currency, eNaira records less than 10% P2P transactions in 3 months

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In October 2021, Nigeria became the first African country to adopt a digital currency, the eNaira. Three months down the line, only 10% of transactions carried out via the digital currency has has been peer-to-peer transactions.

This was revealed by the Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, Godwin Emefiele, at the first MPC meeting of 2022.

According to a Nairametrics report, since the official launch of the digital currency in October 2021, the eNaira has seen a gradual acceptance amongst Nigerians. But 90% of transactions across eNaira wallets have been from persons to banks and vice-versa.

A growth in P2P transactions of this currency would have indicated that residents are increasingly using the eNaira for their daily transactions, but this hasn’t been evident.

Only 10% of digital currency transactions have been transferred between people-to-people (p2p) and people-to-merchants (p2m), indicating that citizens are not enthusiastic about transacting with one another.

Even with these discouraging acceptance figures, the CBN governor has disclosed that the eNaira has been progressively adopted. 

 “Since its inception around three months ago, Nigerians have continued to gradually accept eNaira as a rapid and reliable method of exchange, ” he said.

“We spent the last three months observing and monitoring the system and resolving issues mostly around initial onboarding,” he continued, “and as you will note, we spent the last three months observing and monitoring the system and addressing issues primarily around initial onboarding.” 

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Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, Godwin Emefiele…

The governor of the central bank claimed that the present deployment of the eNaira was intended for banked Nigerians. 

He went on to further disclose that the BVN is included as a need to prevent fraudsters from breaking into the system. 

He added that “we believe that you must have a BVN and an account to access it, and we also believe that this has imposed some type of limitation on people’s onboarding with BVN and the rest of them,” However, we feel that using the BVN is the greatest way to prevent fraudsters from gaining access to the system.”

The majority of the complaints received centred on potential users’ failure to onboard and activate the e-wallet owing to a discrepancy in BVN enrollment information.”


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