Uzbekistan's HUMO Stablecoin Pilot: A Prudent Experiment
For most of the short history of crypto assets, the central concern for smaller economies has been how to keep the digital dollar out, and Uzbekistan has now offered a more constructive answer by building a digital soum of its own. On 7 September 2026, the Central Bank of Uzbekistan and the National Agency for Perspective Projects (NAPP) launched a pilot under which a private firm, HUMO Digital, will issue a token called HUMO that is pegged one-to-one to the soum and backed by Uzbek government securities, with more than 20 merchants prepared to accept it. Since paying for goods and services with crypto assets was not permitted in the country until now, the initiative marks a genuine departure from past policy.
The pilot is a sound first step that merits cautious support rather than either celebration or alarm, because it protects the soum instead of ceding ground to dollar-denominated tokens and because it is being tested within a tight, time-bound regulatory sandbox. Its eventual value, however, will depend on whether regulators close three gaps that the published rules leave open: how redemptions will be honoured under stress, who retains the interest earned on the backing bonds, and how success is to be measured.
The strongest argument in HUMO's favour is the currency to which it is tied. A Bank for International Settlements (BIS) paper published in May 2026 found that roughly 98% of all stablecoin value is denominated in dollars, and warned that in emerging economies this can steadily draw savings and payments away from the local currency. Uzbekistan has spent years combating precisely this problem with visible results, as the central bank's financial stability review shows that the share of foreign-currency deposits fell from 25% to 21% during 2025. A soum-pegged token keeps any new digital demand within the national currency, which is the path the same BIS paper identifies as capable of delivering efficiency gains while preserving policy autonomy, provided that regulatory capacity is strong enough to manage it.
The second argument concerns the care with which the pilot has been designed. It rests on Presidential Resolution PP-359 of 27 November 2025 and on a formal regulation governing stable tokens that was registered with the Ministry of Justice in April 2026, which means it is not an informal trial dependent on goodwill. The initial phase lasts 12 months, the project as a whole cannot exceed three years, and the central bank has committed to monitoring collateral adequacy, cybersecurity, consumer protection, anti-money laundering compliance and any effect on price stability.
The principal weakness lies in the backing itself. As The Times of Central Asia has observed, government bonds cannot always be converted into cash at full value on the same day, and their market price may change before maturity. The published rules do not yet specify how much readily available cash HUMO Digital must hold, how much collateral must stand behind each token, or who earns the interest on those bonds, and these questions go to the heart of whether one HUMO will always be worth one soum.
Critics will contend that the idea is flawed from the outset. In its 2025 Annual Economic Report, the BIS argued that stablecoins fail three fundamental tests of sound money, since they can trade below face value, cannot expand supply when the economy requires it, and are vulnerable to misuse for illicit finance. Others will question why Uzbekistan requires a token at all when its domestic card networks already transfer money quickly.
These objections make the case for careful testing rather than for no testing at all. HUMO is not intended to replace the soum or bank deposits, so the concern about supply, which even HSBC's response to the BIS acknowledged stablecoins were never designed to address, carries limited weight at this scale. The risk of misuse is precisely what a supervised sandbox with licensed partners is meant to assess, and the only credible way to establish whether a token adds value beyond existing card payments is to test it with real merchants under close supervision.
Uzbekistan has therefore made a prudent start, and converting it into a durable success requires closing the three gaps identified at the outset. First, NAPP and the central bank should publish a clear liquidity requirement, such as a minimum share of reserves held in cash or very short-term bills, together with a legally binding commitment that every holder can redeem at par within a fixed period.
Second, the authorities should disclose who receives the interest on the backing bonds, so that users can judge whether the issuer is profiting from public debt. Third, before the initial 12 months conclude, they should define and publish the criteria that will govern any extension, including transaction costs, settlement times and recorded fraud cases. Should Tashkent take these steps, HUMO could serve as a model for how a mid-sized economy can enter the era of digital money on its own terms rather than on those of the dollar.
Sources:
Central Bank of the Republic of Uzbekistan. "Uzbekistan Launches Pilot Project to Use the HUMO Stable Token as a Means of Payment." Press release, September 7, 2026. https://cbu.uz/en/press_center/releases/4481353/.
National Agency for Perspective Projects of the Republic of Uzbekistan. "Zapuskaetsya pilotnyi proekt po ispol'zovaniyu stabil'nykh tokenov v kachestve sredstva platezha" [A pilot project on the use of stable tokens as a means of payment is being launched]. September 7, 2026. https://napp.uz/ru/news/barqaror-tokenlardan-to-lov-vositasi-sifatida-foydalanish-bo-yicha-tajriba-sinov-loyihasi-ishga-tushirilmoqda.
Serrari Group. "Uzbekistan Launches Stablecoin Payment Pilot for Goods and Services." https://serrarigroup.com/uzbekistan-launches-stablecoin-payment-pilot-for-goods-and-services/.
Times of Central Asia. "Uzbekistan Tests HUMO Stablecoin for Everyday Payments." September 10, 2026. https://timesca.com/humo-stablecoin-uzbekistan-payments/.
"Uzbekistan Begins Government Bond-Backed Stablecoin Payment Pilot." Cointelegraph, September 8, 2026. https://cointelegraph.com/news/uzbekistan-humo-stablecoin-payment-pilot.
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