The National Bank of Ukraine (NBU) has completed the expanded pilot project to launch the e-hryvnia and continues studying the prospects of applying the tool, the director of the department of payment systems and innovative development of the central bank, Oleksandr Yablunivsky, has said.

"At the end of last year, we launched a practical pilot, when this tool was issued for NBU employees using the existing methodology, in order to evaluate the practical aspect of its use, the strength of the central bank in implementing these tools, and get some feedback from users. The pilot project is now complete. We have prepared an analytical note and we will consider it at a meeting of the board of the National Bank," he said at a press conference in Kyiv last week.

Over time, the NBU will publish an analytical note, which will include an analysis of both the practical pilot project and global trends in this area.

Yablunivsky also said that today, there is no common understanding and a common strategy for the development of these currencies in the world. Moreover, a few central banks of other countries have moved to the practical phase of research, instead of theoretical reasoning of the impact of these tools on monetary policy and on the ecosystem of payments.

"Therefore, we are in this issue, one might even say, ahead of global leaders, since we have made a step in practical research, albeit a small one," he said.

The representative of the NBU also said that many central bank digital currencies (CDBC), like the e-hryvnia, are confused with cryptocurrencies and other tools.

"We are not talking about cryptocurrency, we are talking about CDBC. It can be implemented using both the centralized register technology and the decentralized one. This is a completely single issue, which follows from the target model [for e-hryvnia] that will be chosen," Yablunivsky said.