Most central banks studying digital money have spent five years trying to work out what a retail central bank digital currency would be for. The Central Bank of Uzbekistan has decided it would be for nothing.

"For the retail one, we do not see any value for the central bank to create a digital currency," Governor Timur Ishmetov told reporters in Tashkent.

It’s a hot topic as fintech booms and is rapidly displacing traditional bricks and mortar banking. Digital banking wants digital currencies.

The National Bank is exploring a wholesale Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) as it has huge implications for cross border trade, but retail is a different kettle of fish.

The retail side goes to privately issued stablecoins, tested in a joint sandbox with the National Agency for Perspective Projects, which regulates crypto assets and which has already been given legal cover for the pilot.

Plenty of central banks have quietly deprioritised retail CBDCs. Saying so on the record, and naming the private substitute, is rarer. The reasoning is that fintech got there first.

"During the last five years the financial technology developed very fast," said Samigjon Inogamov, the director of the Uzbek central bank's monetary policy department told IntelliNews in an interview. "Our banking sector and financial sector provide all these services and functions which retail CBDC usually promotes itself on. So now we have this instant payment system. It's very fast and it's cheap. And we have our national card systems, Humo and Uzcard. So, we don't see what kind of new value a retail CBDC can create."

Uzbekistan has an unusual advantage here: it never built the legacy payments system a retail CBDC is supposed to fix. Instant payments, two competing domestic card schemes and a dense fintech layer arrived more or less at once. "Everybody who has a smartphone can easily get a loan, a microloan, using their smartphone, in just one minute," Inogamov said. The gap never opened.

Underneath that sits a monetary objection. A retail CBDC would put the central bank directly in front of the public, cutting out the commercial bank in the middle. "According to our traditional approach there should be a financial intermediary," Inogamov said. Removing it "would somehow create risk to the effectiveness of monetary policy."

What the stablecoins have to do

The rules are already tighter than the sandbox framing suggests. Interest payments on stablecoins are prohibited, in line with international practice. And issuance must be fully backed, with reserve requirements set by the central bank.

"At first we want to see and analyse how it will go, and then to build the regulation," Inogamov said.

What the bank is watching for is not what most regulators say they are watching for. It is not primarily fraud, or runs, or consumer protection. It is denomination.

"If they are saving in foreign stablecoins, it affects our dollarisation level," Inogamov said. "If that occurs it will weaken our monetary policy effectiveness — our decisions will reach a smaller part of the economy."

The reverse also holds, and this is the part with no public precedent in Uzbek policy. A soum-denominated stable token, he argues, would improve monetary transmission rather than damage it. "Now our capital market is not well developed, and the issuance of soum-denominated stablecoins will improve access for a wider group of users for saving purposes."

In other words, the same instrument is a threat or a tool depending entirely on the currency printed on it — a materially more sophisticated position than the risk-or-opportunity framing most regulators have settled on. For cross-border use, he adds, the effect lands on the exchange rate rather than on policy, and the float absorbs it.

The peg that has gone quiet

One thing has changed without being announced. When Uzbekistan first set out this architecture in late 2025, the design was explicit: retail stablecoins backed one-to-one by the wholesale CBDC, with the central bank's digital money anchoring privately issued tokens. It was an unusual structure, and it drew international attention precisely because it inverted the standard choice — most governments push CBDCs to displace stablecoins, not to underwrite them.

Asked about that design directly in Tashkent, Ishmetov described the sandbox and the reserve requirements, and did not restate the one-to-one link. Inogamov, asked separately, described reserves held at the central bank — not a CBDC peg. Neither disowned the earlier design. But he didn’t confirm it either.

The document that has not appeared

Ishmetov told the forum's opening session that the bank would publish a white paper on a CBDC, covering potential use cases, design options, key trade-offs and the implications for the financial system. Its conclusions, he said, should provide the basis for moving to a pilot phase and for assessing how far a digital currency could contribute to innovation and the digital economy in Uzbekistan.

He was equally clear that the work is unfinished. On digital assets and new forms of money, the central bank remains, in his words, at the “research and development stage,” and its approach would be comprehensively considered and grounded in facts.

Two weeks on, the document has still not appeared. Inogamov's account is that it is written and waiting: "Now this white paper is already ready, we will publish it, and we will start to pilot the wholesale."

There is a pattern. A presidential resolution required a CBDC pilot roadmap to be approved by April 2026. The National Fintech Strategy for 2026-2030, mandated by decree last November, remains unpublished nine months on. Uzbekistan has been faster at announcing its digital money architecture than at documenting it.

What the neighbours are doing, and what Beijing thinks

The research has a partner. The bank is working with the Swiss National Bank, whose chair Martin Schlegel visited Tashkent in November 2025 to speak on CBDCs, and whose own work has concentrated on wholesale settlement rather than retail — which tells you something about the model Tashkent is studying.

Uzbekistan is nonetheless the outlier in its own region. Kyrgyzstan has approved a digital som pilot. Kazakhstan is running a CBDC pilot alongside a state-linked stablecoin and a crypto reserve built with Binance. Both are keeping the retail piece. Uzbekistan is the only one handing it away.

Whether that instrument can carry the weight is the open question, and the sharpest sceptic was in the room. Mu Changchun, who runs the People's Bank of China's Digital Currency Institute, put numbers to it: of roughly $60 trillion in on-chain transfers last year across 16 public chains and 36 stablecoins, his monitoring platform found about $8.5trn was institutions rebalancing internally, $16.3trn was arbitrage turnover and a further tranche was leverage-related. Of the roughly $25trn left, transactions with a genuine payment background accounted for less than 1%.

The efficiency stablecoins appear to offer, he argued, "largely stems from bypassing compliance requirements such as customer due diligence, rather than from inherent technological superiority."

Effective on-chain customer due diligence does not exist, and nobody can reliably identify the ultimate controller of a wallet. In his jurisdiction, virtual currencies are not legal tender and issuing them is illegal.

"Establish the rules before you pave the channels," he said.

Uzbekistan's own regulator concedes the measurement problem. A token spent on a supplier and a token held for a year look identical in the transaction record, Inogamov has noted publicly, but for monetary policy they are entirely different things — and because tokens can move between wallets without touching a bank account, neither may appear in the statistics the central bank works from.

Which is the honest limit on the policy. Uzbekistan has decided the public does not need central bank digital money because the private sector already does the job. It is now waiting to find out whether it can see what the private sector is doing.