Building the first CBDC in Africa

E Naira photo success stories800x400

Objectives of eNaira

In driving this core objective, the eNaira will also deliver on key economic objectives of the CBN highlighted below whih will impact overall economic growth and that generate significant social and economic benefits for all Nigerians.

Developing and
Deploying the eNaira

The CBN wanted the eNaira’s usability to be on par with advanced payment applications already in Nigeria. Value was to be the differentiator. Bitt worked directly with CBN to determine the ideal technology solutions to meet the functional, ethical, and monetary policy requirements for Nigeria’s use cases, scope, and other factors.

  1. CBN went through our product’s functionality, hosted in a sandbox environment, identified the key requirements that would be required for the initial launch, and started building a list of items to include in a roadmap.
  2. We defined the main configurable aspects of the solution, such as branding, wallet tiers, transaction alerting, onboarding flows for consumers and merchants.
  3. We implemented and configured the solution in CBN’s hosting environment.
  4. We worked with stakeholders, such as banks and the national payment system, to integrate the solution.
  5. We supported the CBN and stakeholders to mint their first eNaira, set-up banks and merchants.
  6. We conducted extensive testing, including a closed pilot with real users and stakeholders, prior to the launch event.



2021 - 2024 Milestones

OCTOBER 2021 – JANUARY 2022
    • Banked customer onboarding
    • eNaira Wallet cash-in/cash-out
    • eNaira wallet to eNaira wallet transfer (P2P, P2B)
    • Core Banking integration v1 - for Account to eNaira Wallet

FEBRUARY 2022 – AUGUST 2022
    • Unbanked customer onboarding and transactions via USSD
    • Integrations with the National Payment Service for QR functionality and wholesale funds transfer (RTGS)
    • Onboarding of IMTOs and integration of DCMS to exchange naira
    • Merchant onboarding and transactions
    • Core banking integration optimization for financial institutions
    • Multi-lingual support for mobile applications and USSD
    • Onboarding of Wallet developers
    • SMS integration with CBN’s SMS gateway service
    • Security hardening

SEPTEMBER 2022 – JUNE 2023
    • Onboarding of Nigerian Trade and Exchange platform
    • Sector-specific tokens for grants and subsidies
    • Custom smart contracts for eNaira payment scenarios
    • Onboarding of revenue generating and disbursing MDAs such as NIMC, FIRS and MDAs

JULY 2023 - 2024
    • Offline eNaira payments solution
    • Integration with other CBDC systems
    • Multi-Sig Wallets

The Implementation Roadmap had three phases of updates which were to be released bi-monthly in a timespan of four months after the eNaira launch. The peculiarity of the Nigerian payments system requires sophisticated and novel features and functionalities such as USSD and the merchants' portal (as the API are being built from scratch for such functionalities to be deployed).

Press Releases

  • Bitt Develops Africa’s First CBDC Oct 25, 2021 Read Article
  • Bitt Awarded CBDC Contract for Central Bank of Nigeria Aug 30, 2021 Read Article