Tashkent, Uzbekistan (UzDaily.uz) — The Central Bank of Uzbekistan, together with Singapore-based Global Finance & Technology Network (GFTN) and London-based think tank OMFIF, has prepared a report assessing the feasibility of issuing a wholesale central bank digital currency (wCBDC), a digital currency designed for interbank settlements rather than payments by the general public.
The report, titled “Uzbekistan’s Path to a Wholesale Central Bank Digital Currency: Preconditions, Implications and Trade-offs,” examines the potential role of a wholesale digital soum in the further development of Uzbekistan’s financial and payment infrastructure.
“The Central Bank of the Republic of Uzbekistan is exploring the potential role of a wholesale central bank digital currency as part of the further development of the country’s financial and payment infrastructure,” the report’s foreword says. It stresses that the study is analytical and “does not predetermine decisions on the issuance or implementation” of such a currency.
Why wholesale rather than retail
The report explains why the study focuses on a wholesale rather than retail digital currency. According to its authors, Uzbekistan already has a developed cash system, modern card infrastructure and an operational instant payment system, with plans for further expansion. As a result, the payment needs of the population are already well served, while assessing the marginal benefits of a retail CBDC falls outside the scope of the report.
Capital market settlements and alternatives
The report identifies eliminating settlement risk in the domestic capital market as a key potential use case for a wholesale digital soum. Uzbekistan’s capital markets are currently undergoing reforms, while the National Agency of Perspective Projects (NAPP), together with the Central Bank, oversees a regulatory sandbox for stablecoins covering both crypto-asset trading and the tokenisation of traditional securities.
Settlements for transactions on Uzbekistan’s capital market currently take one to two days, depending on the asset class. Brokers form guarantee funds to cover the risk of counterparty insolvency. The report’s authors argue that these costs could be eliminated through settlement on distributed ledgers.
The report stresses, however, that a digital currency is not the only way to achieve risk-free settlement. Another option is to synchronise existing real-time gross settlement (RTGS) systems with transactions on distributed ledgers. The Bundesbank has pursued this approach, testing a “trigger solution” as part of a European Central Bank project in 2024, and the United Kingdom is also expected to follow this path.
According to the authors, synchronisation is generally cheaper to develop and does not require a payment system to operate around the clock. However, it creates risks from operational dependence on two systems and does not provide the same flexibility for programmable payments as a native digital currency.
The report also compares traditional central bank reserves, synchronisation solutions, tokenised deposits, stablecoins denominated in the national currency and a wholesale digital soum across four criteria: settlement finality and risk reduction, efficiency for tokenised finance, operational resilience and financial stability. The authors conclude that a wholesale digital soum performs strongly where native blockchain settlement, 24-hour operation or enhanced resilience are valued, but is not strictly necessary to meet the country’s domestic payment needs.
Soum stablecoins and tokenised deposits
The report also examines the interaction between a wholesale digital soum and stablecoins denominated in the national currency. Their reserves could be exchanged for wCBDC through a liquidity pool, which could increase the reliability of their backing.
As an indication of potential demand, the report cites a TBC Digital transaction in February 2026, when around 4 trillion soums were moved on the secondary market, as well as a peak money-market volume of around 256 trillion soums (US$20.9 billion) in the third quarter of 2025.
The report also considers a scenario in which banks tokenise their own deposits, similar to the GBTD pilot project, formerly known as the Regulated Liability Network, in the United Kingdom. Under such a model, a wholesale digital soum could be used for final interbank settlement between tokenised deposits.
Impact on money supply and access
The report notes that issuing a wCBDC would affect the structure of the money supply by partially replacing traditional central bank reserves. However, citing International Monetary Fund research, it says that if the digital currency had the same regulatory treatment, remuneration and access conditions as conventional reserves, this substitution would be unlikely to affect short-term interest rates.
For access to the system, the authors propose a three-tier model: participants holding reserve accounts with the Central Bank; licensed exchanges and digital asset service providers; and payment service providers that would have access to wallets without direct access to reserve accounts.
Payment system resilience and sovereignty
The report also examines risks to payment infrastructure from so-called advanced persistent threats (APTs), which are actors capable of compromising access to payment systems or their integrity.
As an example of the vulnerability of centralised messaging systems such as SWIFT, the authors cite the 2016 Bangladesh Bank heist, which they say was allegedly carried out by an APT group with resources limited compared with those of major states.
The authors note that reducing dependence on such centralised nodes is one of the motivations behind the European Central Bank’s digital euro project, which is largely driven by the EU’s desire to reduce dependence on Mastercard and Visa card networks.
Remittances and cross-border payments
A separate chapter examines cross-border payments. According to the figures cited in the report, personal remittances to Uzbekistan reached US$18.9 billion in 2025, equivalent to around 18% of the country’s GDP, up from US$14.8 billion in 2024.
The report, citing World Bank data from 2021 — the latest available figures in the report — says the average cost of sending US$200 to Uzbekistan is around 2.1–2.4%, significantly below the global average of 6.5%.
The authors note that around 90% of foreign-exchange transactions worldwide involve the US dollar to some degree. Although Uzbekistan can conduct direct settlements in Chinese yuan and Kazakh tenge, most of its trade remains intermediated through the dollar.
The report considers international projects aimed at reducing such dependence, including the People’s Bank of China’s mBridge project involving China, Hong Kong, Thailand, the UAE and Saudi Arabia, as well as Project Agorá of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS).
According to the report, none of Uzbekistan’s 10 largest trading partners is among mBridge observers. The authors also note that some observers that do not issue their own CBDCs allow their commercial banks to hold digital currencies issued by participating countries. This could improve the efficiency of cross-border settlements but could also increase the use of foreign currency in the observer economy, creating what the report describes as a risk of “yuanisation.”
The report separately refers to Project Cedar, a joint initiative of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and the Monetary Authority of Singapore. It showed that wholesale digital currencies on distributed ledgers can improve currency liquidity by using a bridge currency between pairs of currencies with low liquidity.
Project Dunbar is cited as another reference point for expanding cooperation. An alternative to issuing a national digital currency for cross-border settlements is Project Nexus of the BIS Innovation Hub, which is developing a standardised gateway for connecting national instant payment systems. Singapore and Thailand have already followed this approach by directly linking their instant payment systems.
The report also discusses the potential development of bilateral relations with Kazakhstan. According to the report, settlements between the soum and tenge still rely on the SWIFT messaging system and take several days. The launch of a digital soum would allow Uzbekistan to interact with Kazakhstan’s digital tenge “on equal terms.”
The authors also point to the spread of dollar-denominated stablecoins as a new channel of dollarisation, since such instruments can often be easier to access than dollar bank accounts. The report notes that several central banks, including the Bank of Ghana, are considering retail CBDCs specifically to compete with dollar stablecoins within their economies.
Economic viability and decision criteria
The report proposes quantitative models for assessing the economic feasibility of implementing a wholesale digital soum for domestic and cross-border use separately.
The models take into account the share of the market transferred to the new platform, the cost of liquidity locked to cover settlement risk, losses from failed transactions and the operating costs of maintaining new infrastructure. For the cross-border scenario, they additionally factor in savings on correspondent banking fees and the release of capital tied up in nostro accounts.
The authors identify several qualitative triggers for beginning work on a digital soum: sustained growth in the capital market, development of soum-denominated stablecoins, interest from Uzbek banks in tokenising deposits and a need to improve cross-border payments.
24-month roadmap
The report proposes a 24-month roadmap for the Central Bank to implement a wholesale digital soum, divided into three stages.
The investigation phase would involve forming domestic and international working groups, defining technical requirements, assessing macroeconomic effects and preparing a legal opinion.
The experimentation phase would include technical integration and the launch of domestic and cross-border sandboxes with a limited number of participants.
The final scaling phase would involve gradually opening access to the system to a broader range of market participants under a licensing model.
International experience and Brazil’s warning
According to the report, by mid-2026, 146 countries and currency unions, accounting for more than 98% of global GDP, had studied central bank digital currencies in some form, compared with 87 jurisdictions in May 2022.
Seventy-seven had reached an advanced stage of development, piloting or launch. At the same time, only three countries — the Bahamas, Jamaica and Nigeria — had fully and unconditionally launched retail CBDCs.
The report notes that several developed economies, including Canada, Australia, Norway and Thailand, have suspended or scaled back work on retail CBDCs. It also says the United States has legally prohibited the Federal Reserve from issuing, piloting or even studying a retail digital currency.
At the same time, the report says the global focus of CBDC development has shifted towards wholesale and cross-border solutions. Thirteen cross-border wholesale digital currency projects are currently underway worldwide, more than twice the number of such initiatives before 2022.
China’s e-CNY remains the world’s largest active pilot, with more than 3.48 billion transactions worth around 16.7 trillion yuan, or approximately US$2.3 trillion, conducted since November 2025.
According to the report, the mBridge platform has processed around US$55.5 billion across more than 4,000 transactions, with about 95% of settlement volume accounted for by the digital yuan.
Other national programmes cited in the report include Hong Kong’s Ensemble project and the parallel e-HKD+ programme, which are testing, among other things, settlements using tokenised deposits. In 2026, they also tested 24-hour use of wholesale CBDC for margin payments on exchange-traded derivatives.
The report also refers to South Korea’s Hangang project, a platform for commercial bank deposit tokens that entered its second, expanded phase on 15 July 2026. The number of users increased from 100,000 to 500,000 across nine participating banks, including for government subsidy payments, while a full-scale launch was scheduled for September 2026.
Other examples include Payment Connect, which links the instant payment systems of Hong Kong and Singapore, and Project Aber, a historic bilateral pilot between Saudi Arabia and the UAE conducted in 2019–2020 that laid the groundwork for both countries’ subsequent participation in mBridge.
The report gives particular attention to Kazakhstan’s experience. The digital tenge received legal tender status on 18 July 2026 after more than 100 pilot projects and cumulative issuance of around 340 billion tenge. Its use became mandatory for eight categories of government spending exceeding 100 million tenge.
The report’s authors describe Kazakhstan’s experience — with narrowly defined pilots and the legal status of the digital currency established in advance — as an example of a successful sequence of steps for other countries in the region, including Uzbekistan.
As a cautionary example, the report cites Brazil’s Drex project. It began as one of the most technically ambitious blockchain-based wholesale CBDC projects but was later redesigned as a centralised system without blockchain, focused on collateral management and data reconciliation in conjunction with the existing Pix payment system.
The authors describe the case as a “useful warning” for jurisdictions considering complex, bespoke distributed-ledger development from the outset.
Alternative architectures
The report’s final section notes that distributed ledger technology is not the only possible foundation for a digital soum.
According to a 2024 Bank for International Settlements survey of 93 central banks, distributed ledger technology is used in around 56% of wholesale CBDC projects in advanced economies. For retail CBDCs, centralised and distributed architectures are used in roughly equal proportions.
Alternatives listed in the report include a centralised architecture based on a single database, with the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston and Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Project Hamilton pilot demonstrating processing of 1.7 million transactions per second.
Other options include the hybrid architecture used, among others, by China’s e-CNY and India’s e₹; a tokenised database model based on Singapore’s Project Orchid; a cloud architecture based on microservices; and an application programming interface (API)-based architecture tested through Project Rosalind by the Bank of England and the BIS Innovation Hub.
