In what will be perceived as a victory for Nigeria’s central bank digital currency (CBDC), FinTech Flutterwave announced Wednesday (Sept. 14) that merchants using its platform can now accept eNaira payments from their customers.
Flutterwave merchants can now enable the payment option on their dashboard for customer use. To complete transactions on Flutterwave, users can either scan QR codes or generate one-time tokens using the app.
As PYMNTS reported earlier this year, the governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), Godwin Emefiele, has accused banks of “apathy” when it comes to the use of the eNaira. He said that only around 700,000 customers have opened an eNaira wallet since it debuted in 2021, even though there are around 55 million bank accounts in the country.
Read more: Concerns Over Lost Fee Income Prompt Nigerian Lenders to Slow CBDC Adoption
Emefiele suggested that Nigerian banks’ hesitancy comes from a perceived loss of revenue from transaction fees and the prospect of a diminished role for commercial banks in the payments ecosystem, a process known as bank disintermediation.
In light of the sluggish initial adoption of the eNaira, the CBN will likely welcome the news that one of the country’s largest payment service providers is rolling out support for the CBDC. Last month, PYMNTS reported that the CBN has set a target of 8 million eNaira wallets.
More on this: Nigeria Aims for 8M eNaira Users as Crypto Adoption Grows
Nigeria is moving into the second phase of the eNaira project, and the CBN has made the digital currency available to people without a bank account. The news that Flutterwave will support eNaira payments creates another opportunity for the technology to gain traction with Nigerian consumers.
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Cryptocurrency exchange Bybit has awarded a collective bounty of $4.2 million to five bounty hunters that have helped trace and freeze funds that were stolen from the exchange in a hack.
Bybit is offering a total bounty of $140 million, which is equal to 10% of the $1.4 billion that was taken in the hack, according to the company’s website called Lazarusbounty that provides information on the hack and the bounty.
“Join us on war against Lazarus,” Bybit Co-Founder and CEO Ben Zhou said in a Wednesday (Feb. 25) post on X announcing the site and referring to the hacker, Lazarus. “Industry first bounty site that shows aggregated full transparency on the sanctioned Lazarus money laundering activities.”
The site said that bounties will be awarded immediately when funds are confirmed as frozen, and that there will be bounties of 5% of the recovered funds to the entity that froze the funds and 5% to contributors who helped trace the funds.
The site also ranks involved parties like exchangers, mixers or bridges, dubbing them “good actors” or “bad actors” based on their response time and cooperation in either freezing the funds or providing updates on the funds’ movement.
“We have assigned a team to dedicate to maintain and update this website, we will not stop until Lazarus or bad actors in the industry is eliminated,” Zhou wrote in his post. “In the future we will open it up to other victims of Lazarus as well.”
Bybit said Friday (Feb. 21) that a cyberattacker stole some of its holdings, adding that the attacker was able to transfer these holdings to an unidentified address after gaining control of one of Bybit’s ethereum (ETH) cold wallets when it was executing a transfer to one of its warm wallets.
On Monday (Feb. 24), Bybit said it had replenished its reserve after the hack, conducting a fresh audit and restoring its reserve to a 1:1 ratio within 72 hours of the incident.
The attack showed that as the blockchain ecosystem grows, security challenges become more complex, PYMNTS reported Wednesday, noting that the attack was described as being likely the “largest incident ever, not just crypto.”