TL;DR Breakdown
- Ukraine bank to begin pilot test of country’s CBDC digital hryvnia.
- Testing to be done on Stella network by fintech firm, Bitt.
- Ukraine Central bank and Digital transformation to supervise testing.
- XLM price falls 40 percent from ATH.
Tascombank, the oldest commercial bank in Ukraine, has announced plans to test digital hryvnia (Ukraine’s fiat currency) on the Stellar network.
The test would be carried out by FinTech firm Bitt and Tascombank under the supervision of Ukraine’s central bank and support from the Ministry of Digital Transformation.
Why Pilot test of digital hryvnia on Stellar network?
In a press release, Oleksandr Bornyakov, the Deputy Minister of Digital Transformation, said that the pilot project serves as a technological basis for the issuance of electronic money.
He called it the next key step to advance innovation of payment and financial infrastructure in Ukraine. On how the pilot would work, the minister said the pilot would test the use case for programmable payroll with employees at Diva, a public IT solutions enterprise in Ukraine.
Valeriy Danilenko, Tascombank’s deputy chairman who is responsible for e-commerce, on his part, said that the commercial ban aims at conducting the test in the shortest reasonable time. He said they are working with partners and stakeholders in Ukraine but failed to reveal when or how long the test would run.
XLM continues free fall, plunge 40% from June ATH
XLM, Stella’s native token, has continued to plunge over the past 24 hours. It is worth noting that XLM has been falling for over a month after hitting its highest level since early June at 0.4411. It has now dropped from the ATH by 41.55%.
XLM trades at $0.255, a -2.3% decrease from its consolidated value at press time. A four-hour chart is trading below the 25 and 50-day exponential moving averages. In the short term, it will likely remain within the horizontal channel between December’s low of 0.2474 and the 50-day EMA at 0.2747.
The CBDC trend
With Ukraine moving from just partnership to trial, the country is now ahead of others in Europe to adopt a CBDC. Most central banks are still researching potential use cases of CBDCs.
Most recently, France ran a cross-border payments experiment with a Swiss bank. Beyond Europe, China has gone far with testing its Digital Yuan. Bahamas and Nigeria are the only countries to have launched their sand dollar since 2020. Nigeria launched the eNaira, in November.
