When the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) launched the eNaira in October 2021, it was presented as a historic milestone Africa’s first retail Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC). The initiative aimed to accelerate Nigeria’s cashless transition, lower remittance costs, foster economic growth, and bridge the financial inclusion gap.
Nearly five years later, those grand ambitions remain largely unfulfilled. The eNaira struggled to find its footing in a highly competitive market, offering little incremental value over Nigeria’s deeply entrenched network of commercial bank apps, fintech wallets, and mobile money platforms.
In its newly unveiled Payments System Vision (PSV) 2028 strategy, released on June 1, 2026, the apex bank signaled a fundamental shift in the eNaira’s trajectory. Rather than positioning the CBDC as a standalone retail wallet competing directly with commercial banks and fintech startups, the CBN intends to transform the eNaira into a foundational layer underpinning Nigeria’s broader digital payments architecture.
Under the new blueprint, the CBDC will be integrated alongside critical national initiatives such as open banking, digital identity and cross border payments and emerging financial technology innovations.
The shift show lessons from the eNaira’s slow adoption since 2021 its launched, as its struggle to deliver existing digital payment options.
Right from the start, the eNaira faced a design paradox. To prevent fraud and money laundering, the CBN built it with strict identity verification requirements, initially demanding a BVN or NIN. However, these strict guardrails cut off unbanked Nigerians the exact demographic the project promised to lift into the financial ecosystem. For those who did have formal IDs, the platform simply couldn’t compete. Tech-savvy consumers stayed with existing bank apps, USSD shortcuts, and fintech wallets because they were already faster, more familiar, and far more convenient.
Because of these problems, very few people actually used the eNaira. Even though the central bank later added quick phone codes (USSD), merchant features, and government payment programs, the digital currency still made up only a tiny part of Nigeria’s digital payments. In fact, when Nigeria faced a massive shortage of physical cash in 2023, the eNaira barely helped, making many people question if it was even useful. Over time, experts around the world began using the eNaira as a prime example of a digital currency that failed to become popular.
The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) admits to these mistakes in its new 2028 plan. The bank says that while millions of people opened digital wallets, the eNaira only processed about ₦22 billion ($16.02 million) in total transactions. The regulator openly stated that adoption was slow because they did not involve the right people during the design phase. They also admitted that the central bank spent too much time trying to market the app and register users tasks that are not a normal part of a central bank’s job.
The biggest takeaway from the PSV 2028 plan is that the CBN now sees payment tools as connected systems rather than single, isolated products. Throughout the report, the bank talks a lot about making different networks work together, using digital IDs, sharing financial data safely (open banking), sending instant payments, and updating old rules.
The plan highlights international payments as a top priority. While it doesn’t give a step-by-step roadmap for taking the eNaira outside Nigeria, it shows that the digital currency’s future will focus on helping people send money home from abroad and making regional trade easier.
The CBN also admits that technology alone won’t save the eNaira. To succeed, the app needs user trust, tight security, and ease of use. To fix this, the bank is planning better ways to protect customers, stronger security against hackers, and closer teamwork across the entire financial sector.
No one knows if this new plan will work. But it is clear that the CBN is no longer looking at the eNaira as a lonely experiment. Instead, it is becoming just one piece of a much larger, safer, and better-connected financial system. This change might just give a second chance to a project that many people had already written off.
