The Barbados-based financial technology firm Bitt, has developed the central bank digital currency for Nigeria, making that country the first on the Africa continent to use a legal tender digital currency for their daily financial transactions. Bitt made the announcement of the roll out of the new digital currency, known as the eNaira, in a statement on Monday.
Bitt said it was very excited to be entering the African central bank digital currency market as a technology partner of the central bank of Nigeria, noting that Bitt’s digital currency management system fulfilled the Nigeria central Bank criteria for technological competence, efficiency, platform security, interoperability, and implementation experience.
The company’s digital currency management system is currently licensed by national financial institutions in six countries across Central America and the Caribbean. Chief Executive Officer of Bitt Brian Popelka said: “We are elated to have developed, tested and deployed the eNaira monetary infrastructure in record time.
Today’s launch is an exceptional achievement for both the central bank of Nigeria and Bitt teams. We look forward to continued partnership on this central bank digital currency deployment journey and to provide additional features to expand eNaira’s value to all Nigerians”.
He said Bitt was driven by the empowerment of people through providing accessible, low-cost, and real-time payments; and supporting the digitisation of economies. He added that Bitt’s digital currency management system could lower infrastructure cost and improve the access and user experience of receiving and sending money, thereby promoting financial inclusion throughout Nigeria.
“Furthermore, the eNaira has been designed to promote local innovation, leveraging Nigeria’s world-class FinTech talent,” said the release. Bitt’s digital currency management system is a production-ready digital currency infrastructure that enables central banks and financial institutions to efficiently deploy their own digital currency.
It plugs into the underlying transaction network of choice, such as Hyperledger Fabric (used in the implementations of DCash in the Eastern Caribbean Currency Union and the eNaira in Nigeria), Stellar Network (to be presented at the 2021 Singapore Fintech Festival) and others to come in 2022, the company said. (PR)
