Launching eHryvnia requires significant financial investments, which are ethically questionable during a war, so the development of eHryvnia is ongoing, but there are doubts about its implementation in 2027, said Oleksiy Shaban, Deputy Chairman of the National Bank of Ukraine (NBU).
“We are considering the digital hryvnia at the legislative level. It is meant that it is a legal tender and simply a digital form of the national currency – the hryvnia. When it will be implemented, whether it will be implemented – an open question…”, he said during the Kyiv International Economic Forum-2025 in Kyiv on Thursday.
According to Shaban, the NBU is preparing to develop and implement the eHryvnia pilot project. It is planned that it will be available not only for internal testing only “within the walls of the NBU”, but also for real users, for example, for money transfers or payments in favor of the state or as a substitute for card technologies for government programs.
“But, again, the pilot is an expensive thing, the price tags are very high. Now we have made a shortlist of suppliers with whom we would like to work when we are ready,” the deputy chairman of the NBU added.
He also explained that if the project is scaled up, there will be protocols according to which these systems must be stable and work with a large transaction load.
“But the checks are very high, and the question is whether it is ethical during a war to spend these funds only on research… We are moving, but I cannot say that 2027 is the year of the implementation of “eHryvnia”, “- summed up Shaban.
