National Bank of Ukraine is Looking at CBDCs for Retail Payments, Cross-Border Transactions, and Crypto Trading

cryptonews.com:

Ukraine is continuing the work on its digital hryvnia, or e-hryvnia, despite the ongoing aggression by Russia.

The National Bank of Ukraine (NBU) introduced a draft concept for its central bank digital currency (CBDC) on Monday this week. The statement said that the key purpose of e-hryvnia is to perform all the functions of money by supplementing the cash and non-cash forms of the hryvnia.

During the discussion with the representatives of banks, non-banking financial institutions, and the virtual asset market, the National Bank presented the possible design of the e-hryvnia, its architecture, characteristics, and advantages for payment service providers, it said. 

Among those, the bank has presented the possible options for the usage of its CBDC, which are currently under consideration and development. These are: 

Specifically in regards to cryptoassets, the bank argued that,

E-hryvnia has the potential to become one of the key elements of qualitative infrastructure development for the virtual assets market in Ukraine.

The bank also stated that,

"In particular, the use of a technological platform for instant e-hryvnia payments, service programming and data flow analysis will create ample opportunities for the emergence of new business cases, digitalization of services, attraction of new customers, cost optimization, etc."

The project was launched in September last week, with the goal of determining the feasibility of a large-scale issuance of a digital hryvnia in the country. During the creation of the concept, the regulator took into account its own research and the results of a survey of financial market experts regarding the demand for the e-hryvnia conducted by the National Bank in 2021, as well as the experience of other