At its inaugural Silk Road Finance & Technology Forum, Uzbekistan set out plans for a wholesale central bank digital currency that would sit as the settlement layer beneath privately issued stablecoins, a two-tier design now being tested in a regulatory sandbox. Day one moved from the limits of correspondent banking to a two-layer money architecture few other countries have adopted, and closed with a ratings agency setting out the risks to the funding behind the country’s reforms.

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Uzbekistan opened its first Silk Road Finance & Technology Forum in Tashkent on 24 August, a three-day event co-organized by the Central Bank of the Republic of Uzbekistan and the Global Finance & Technology Network (GFTN). Organizers put attendance above 6,000 participants, with around 200 speakers from 74 countries and investors whose combined assets under management exceed $4 billion. Held at the Central Asian Expo Uzbekistan and the Islamic Civilization Centre, the programme ran under the banner of Al-Jabr, the concept that gave rise to the word algebra and a reference to the ninth-century mathematician Al-Khwarizmi of present-day Uzbekistan. Its agenda was built around five themes which are open banking, digital assets and stablecoins, cross-border payments, Islamic finance, and innovation and investment.

Day one ran five consecutive sessions on digital assets, tracing a single argument from the limits of cross-border correspondent banking through to what might replace it. The direction the central bank set out is a wholesale central bank digital currency operating as the settlement layer beneath privately issued stablecoins, an architecture it is testing in a regulatory sandbox. On the same day, S&P Global Ratings cautioned that the cyclical conditions funding the country’s reform programme are unlikely to persist.

A Question for the Panel

Iqbal Jumabhoy, Chief Executive of Edge Capital, opened the forum’s first panel with a question, “if I can send a payment to somebody from here in Tashkent to Bukhara instantly, why can’t I send a payment to somebody in Dubai or Singapore or New York just as easily?” The answers pointed to a series of mismatches: divergent payment standards, divergent anti-money-laundering rules, divergent foreign exchange regimes, sanctions, and correspondent chains in which every hop adds a check, a delay, and a fee. Djamshid Usmanov of the Central Bank of the Republic of Uzbekistan described the same issue from the regulator’s side as domestic payments are instant, while cross-border settlement is not a single system but a chain of jurisdictions.

When David Kleiman, Chief Executive of Klearium, asked how many people present had lost a correspondent bank in the past five years, a substantial number of hands went up. “For those of you that maybe sat on your hands because you’re a little embarrassed, don’t be embarrassed, because it’s a problem globally that so many banks can’t get reliable correspondency.”

Sergio Mello of Anchorage Digital pointed to the limits of existing settlement infrastructure. “The fact that only 18 currencies are on CLS today for global riskless settlement is frankly appalling.”

Competing Approaches

The panel did not converge on a single approach. Mello wanted money brought on-chain in regulated form, arguing that since virtually every central bank already needs a dollar account, dollar stablecoins accelerate an existing dependency rather than create a new one. Kleiman favored compliance-native infrastructure inside the central bank instead.

“I love stablecoins. I think that they’re quite valuable. They are not the panacea or the solution for everyone.” Arif Khan of Razorpay argued for a narrower ambition, calling a single global protocol “like trying to boil the ocean”.

Trust and Fraud in Cross-Border Payments

The second session moved from models to practice as Navin Suri, Managing Director of Financial Services at Accenture, framed the theme “Money moves across the planet in seconds, but does trust move as fast as money moves?” Yevgen Lisnyak of Visa argued that much fraud is not a security failure but social engineering, and cautioned against buying safety by degrading the product. “We should not destroy customer experience. If we build too many walls, people will not go through it.”

Suri closed with a straw poll on whether stablecoins would carry more cross-border value into the region than cards within five years, and put support at roughly ten to fifteen percent of the room. Prajit Nanu of Nium took the contrarian position. “I think stablecoin will see more money going out of Central Asia than money coming in... everybody wants US dollars.” His point was that stablecoins could function as an outflow and dollarisation channel rather than an inbound rail. Later in the day, the central bank’s own session set out plans for a licensed stablecoin framework built on top of a wholesale digital currency.

Three Regulators, No Consensus

The afternoon opened on regulatory timing and split immediately. Chea Serey, Governor of the National Bank of Cambodia, and Vusal Khalilov, Deputy Governor of the Central Bank of Azerbaijan, both argued for waiting and watching. Bilal Bin Saqib, Chairman of the Pakistan Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority, took the opposite view, arguing that technology compounds exponentially while policy moves linearly. His example was his own country: Pakistan banned digital assets in 2018, eight years of prohibition followed, and the reversal came through the Virtual Assets Act 2026 and a licensing portal that opened three days before he took the stage. He stated “that’s eight years lost, where we could have helped build our ecosystem, where we could have had better surveillance, better AML, KYC.”

Serey’s counter was about capability rather than timing. “It’s all right to write the regulations, but do you have the ability to regulate?” Her example was Bakong, Cambodia’s payments system, which she dated to 2017 and described as a response to a competition problem and a dollarisation problem rather than to blockchain trends.

The Architecture Uzbekistan has Chosen

The fourth session set out the central bank’s own model. Nodirbek Achilov, a Deputy Chairman of the central bank, described a wholesale central bank digital currency serving as the settlement layer, with privately issued stablecoins from licensed institutions on top. The central bank owns the foundation; licensed institutions own the retail relationship and the issuance. He said the research was conducted with GFTN, that a white paper is ready for publication, and that a wholesale approach was chosen partly because public trust took seven to eight years to build and the bank is unwilling to risk it. The private leg is being tested in a regulatory sandbox at small scale, alongside an updated Regulatory Sandbox 2.0 that the regulator launched at the forum.

The direction is not entirely new as a presidential decree in late 2025 already set out a two-tier structure in which retail stablecoins are backed one-to-one by a wholesale CBDC. What the forum added was detail and timing. It remains an unusual choice, since most jurisdictions have positioned CBDCs as stablecoin substitutes or embraced stablecoins without building a CBDC at all. Dan Sleep of Fireblocks said he had not seen the configuration elsewhere, though “there’s also method to that”. The sequencing is the inverse of the American one in which Washington has legislated for privately issued dollar stablecoins while ruling out a retail CBDC. Tashkent on the other hand, is building the public settlement layer first. Deployment remains early across the board. Fireblocks’ 2026 survey of more than 600 decision-makers found 88 percent of institutions have committed budget to digital asset infrastructure this year, while only 16 percent have reached production.

S&P Sounds a Note of Caution

The closing session set the investment case against a ratings-agency view. Marius Dan, Chief Executive for Central Asia at Franklin Templeton, made the bull case. May’s listing of UZNIF, the national investment fund, was Uzbekistan’s first international equity transaction, dual-listed in London and Tashkent, raising $603.6 million on an order book above $2.8 billion. Dan characterized the fund’s subsequent premium to net asset value as an obligation rather than a compliment. “That’s why investors are willing to pay a premium to own an exposure to Uzbekistan. So that puts very high expectations on the government.”

Roman Rybalkin of S&P Global Ratings offered a more cautious view. S&P upgraded Uzbekistan to BB from BB minus in November 2025, but the recent run rests on cyclical factors. Gold accounts for roughly a quarter of fiscal revenue, half of merchandise exports, and more than three-quarters of central bank reserves, and Rybalkin argued the labour markets producing the country’s remittance income are unlikely to stay tight.

That concentration is central to the country’s risk profile. Remittances reached $18.9 billion in 2025, up from $14.8 billion the year before, and now account for around a fifth of household income nationally. Russia supplied roughly 78 percent of that flow, falling to 72.4 percent in the first quarter of 2026 as migration diversified toward Europe, South Korea, and the Gulf. That concentration limits how quickly any payments architecture can be rerouted.

Governor Timur Ishmetov addressed the point directly. “We have to focus from probably managing risks to be better prepared for constant shocks.”

Sovereign AI and the Chip Question

The same session turned to sovereign AI as Bobur Khodjaev of the Presidential Administration described a first large supercomputer inside the digital government data centre and data centres planned for Karakalpakstan on green power and set out the country’s position on suppliers. Uzbekistan wants American frontier chips and models alongside cheaper Chinese open-weight ones while building sovereign infrastructure underneath.

Sopnendu Mohanty of GFTN called the large-model debate “a very romantic discussion”, then added a constraint. “To really build efficient model, you need very powerful chips. Today, the US has only access to those.”

For a country hedging across blocs in both payments and compute, access to the most advanced chips remains dependent on US policy.

Disclosure

GFTN co-convened this forum with the Central Bank of Uzbekistan. A GFTN board member moderated the first session and a GFTN senior advisor the second, its Group Chief Executive sat on the fifth alongside the governor of the convening central bank, and the central bank stated on the fourth panel that it researched its CBDC architecture with GFTN.

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