eShilling is a one-for-one, fully reserved Ugandan-shilling stablecoin issued under the National Payment Systems Act, 2020. No yield. No leverage. One job: move shillings cheaply, instantly, and reliably — under the Bank of Uganda's supervision.
The median mobile-money transaction in Uganda is roughly UGX 20,000. The fee architecture punishes everything below it, and a single operator outage can take the country offline for a week.
Send tariff plus withdrawal tariff plus the 0.5% excise levy frequently exceeds 4% of a UGX 5,000 transfer. The 2018 mobile-money tax cut active usage by roughly 40%.
The January 2026 election shutdown took mobile money offline for around seven days, with lost telecom revenue alone estimated at UGX 24 billion. A public ledger keeps clearing when any single operator does not.
P2P fees were harmonised across MTN and Airtel in 2024, but merchant settlement, agent rebalancing, and bank rails remain fragmented. Aggregators bridge some of this — at additional cost.
eShilling does not invent a new monetary system. It puts a public-ledger settlement layer beneath the shilling — issued by a regulated entity, backed one-for-one, redeemable on demand at any participating bank.
You deposit UGX into an eShilling trust account at a participating bank. The trustee confirms receipt under the Trust Deed.
The issuer mints exactly the equivalent quantity of eShilling tokens and credits them to your wallet. Mint = deposit, always.
Send to any wallet, MTN MoMo number, or Airtel Money number through a licensed aggregator. Settles in 3-5 seconds. Fee: under one shilling.
Redeem at any participating bank or aggregator. Tokens burn, UGX lands in your bank account or mobile-money wallet.
Held in segregated trust at multiple primary-dealer banks. Short-tenor. Bankruptcy-remote from the issuer. Attested monthly by a Big Four firm. Streamed in real time to the Bank of Uganda.
Regulate urgently, but wisely — building rails that protect users while letting innovation breathe.
Every part of the design maps to a published regulatory expectation. Annex A of the whitepaper provides a line-by-line correspondence.
Single-purpose entity. Minimum capital UGX 5 billion — five times the statutory floor. Independent-majority Board with section 24 fit-and-proper assessment.
100% segregated in a Trust held by a licensed Ugandan trustee. Bankruptcy-remote from the issuer. No proprietary trading with customer assets.
FIA registration as accountable person. Full KYC/KYB at mint and redeem. Travel-Rule-ready architecture for when Uganda formally adopts.
Aligned with the BoU Cyber Risk Management Guidelines (December 2024). ISO 27001 certification. Multi-chain redundancy. ≤24-hour incident reporting.
No insider issuance. No preferential treatment for any holder. Plain-language disclosures in English and Luganda. Published fee schedule.
Real-time read-only data feed to the Bank of Uganda from day one. Monthly Big-Four attestations. On-chain proof-of-reserves oracle.
A phased build, with defined success criteria at each step and Bank of Uganda observers throughout.
Entity, trustee, primary-dealer bank engagement, sandbox application.
Smart contracts & audit, KYC/AML stack, supervisory feed prototype.
Stellar pilot, 5,000 users, 50 merchants, first attestation published.
Hedera + Polygon deployments, USSD short code, 100,000 users.
EMI licence at sandbox exit. UGX 100 billion in reserves.
EAC remittance corridors, regulated DeFi integrations.
eShilling is co-authored by people who have done this work at scale, in regulated environments, with paying users.
Forty pages: the problem, the design, the reserve architecture, the regulatory pathway, the financial model, every assumption, every risk, every mitigation — and a line-by-line mapping to the Governor's six pillars.