The website of Nigeria’s CBN’s digital currency, eNaira has gone live one week to its official launch date.
The eNaira website recorded over a million hits in just 24 hours after it went live.
This level of traffic indicates that Nigerians and the world at large are very interested in the eNaira.
The Central Bank Of Nigeria (CBN) has said that it will officially launch the digital currency in the month of October.
Particularly, CBN will launch the eNaira on October 4th.
This is after the apex bank cancelled the earlier October 1st date it gave.
Through its Governor, it said it cancelled the earlier date to avoid interference with Nigeria’s Independence Day celebration.
Godwin Emefiele, the CBN’s governor said thus:
“The central bank would not want the event to take the shine away from the Independence celebration.”
Meanwhile, the CBN has provided steps to get started with the eNaira.
Therefore, we will show you the steps below.
But first, you need to understand some things about the digital currency.
What you must know about the eNaira:
The eNaira is a digital currency which the Nigerian apex bank, the CBN, issues.
It is a central bank digital currency (CBDC) which Nigeria’s CBN issues as a legal tender.
CBN describes it as the digital form of the Naira and will be used just like cash.
It said “eNaira is the digital form of the cash and is a direct liability on the Central Bank of Nigeria while the customer deposits are direct liabilities on the financial institutions.”
Meanwhile, the digital currency provides a unique form of money denominated in Naira.
It serves as both a medium of exchange and a store of value.
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The digital currency also offers a better payment prospects in retail transactions when compared to cash payments.
According to the platform, eNaira has an exclusive operational structure that is both remarkable and nothing like other forms of central bank money.
To have eNaira, you would need a digital wallet to hold it.
eNaira Wallet:
The eNaira Wallet is a digital storage that holds the eNaira.
The Wallet is held and managed on a distributed ledger.
CBN says your wallet has the ability to access, hold and use the eNaira.
Benefits of the eNaira:
The eNaira, according to the platform, offers the following benefits.
- Provides fast, cheap, reliable and available payment channel.
- Supports digital economy.
- Improves economic activities.
- It is a simplified and easy cross border payments and trade.
- It provides inclusion of excluded people in the financial system.
- Also, the eNaira provides improved effectiveness of monetary policies.
- It brings ease in tax remittance and collection to support the Country’s growth.
How To access and transact with Nigeria’s eNaira:
The Centarl Bank of Nigeria has, in a post, said that anyone can access the eNaira through the following.
- Customers will be able to access eNaira via the wallet.
This access will be in app stores such as Google Play store and the Apple App store.
- Also, users can access the digital currency by dialing a USSD short code and following the required steps to perform transactions.
Steps To Open, Fund and transact with eNaira Account:
The CBN has said that the platform will make for easier financial transactions for users of eNaira.
It will provide users the opportunity to send money in form of peer-to-peer payments.
Through peer-to-peer transaction, users will send and or receive money to one another.
But the users will first link their bank accounts or bank debit and credit cards to their wallets.
They must scan a QR code on the platform to get started.
Also, this will allow customers to move money from their bank accounts to their eNaira wallet with ease.
Similarly, users can monitor their eNaira wallet, check balances and view transaction history.
They can also make in-store payment using their eNaira wallet.
How it works:
Explaining how users can operate their eNaira accounts, the CBN Governor, Godwin Emefiele said Nigerians will be able to download the eNaira app from either Google plays store or Apple app store.
He said they will, afterwards, sign into the digital currency’s app and platform and fund their wallets.
They will be able to do so using their bank account or with cash at a registered agent location.
Emefiele said as follows:
“If you are a bank customer and you have say N10 million in your bank account, for your comfort of spending and making purchase, you can tell the bank to load N2 million out of your N10 million into your wallet.
“So, your bank balance in physical cash drops to N8 million, while your e-wallet carries N2 million. With that you can make purchases both within and across the country.
“There are so many variance of the eNaira.”
“But this is where we would start because we are not going to pretend that there are not risks in opening your system up.”
“We would look at the various products, determine the risk.”
He added we would “determine best ways to mitigate the risk before we now open it up more and more.”
Meanwhile, while speaking to a gathering of foreign investors in New York, recently, Emefiele added thus:
“We are going to be the first country in Africa to launch a digital currency. It is a novel idea because we think it will facilitate trade, Nigeria being the biggest economy in Africa, this will set the tone to tell Africa that we are ready to lead and we would indeed lead in trade and we would make sure that happens.”
“Between all central bankers in ECOWAS, we are already working on certain collaboration to make trade, payment and banking system integrate in such a way to set example on the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA).”
Implication:
The implication of this is that the eNaira will have huge acceptance.
It will also place the country as first in Africa to officially launch the digital currency.
Also, soon enough, Nigerians will be fully transacting with the digital currency.
Likewise, foreign businesses and transactions will be done using the digital currency.
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