The Central Bank of Uzbekistan and the Global Finance & Technology Network held the first Silk Road Finance & Technology Forum in Tashkent across three days in August 2026, drawing more than 6,000 participants and around 200 speakers from 74 countries. The strategic question running through all three days was sequencing, with regulators from China, Kenya, Thailand, Pakistan, and Uzbekistan each setting out what has to be built, measured, or legislated before digital finance reaches scale.

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What the Silk Road Finance & Technology Forum Was

The forum was co-hosted by the Central Bank of the Republic of Uzbekistan and GFTN, the non-profit founded in 2024 by the Monetary Authority of Singapore. The first two days ran at the Central Asian Expo and the third at the Islamic Civilisation Centre, with organisers putting attendance above 6,000 participants and roughly 200 speakers from 74 countries. The programme ran under the banner of Al-Jabr, a reference to the ninth-century mathematician Al-Khwarizmi of present-day Uzbekistan, across five themes: open banking, digital assets and stablecoins, cross-border payments, Islamic finance, and innovation and investment. Governor Timur Ishmetov said that “scale alone is not sufficient”, and that the objective is to convert adoption into economic value while holding financial stability and public trust.

Day One: Correspondent Banking and the CBDC Architecture

The opening day led with the macro case as Deputy Prime Minister Jamshid Kuchkarov set out a decade of six to seven percent average growth that has tripled the economy to about $180 billion. Governor Ishmetov announced a National FinTech Strategy for 2026 to 2030, alongside a Central Bank Innovation Hub, a venture fund, an upgraded Regulatory Sandbox 2.0, a 5,000-student training programme and a forthcoming CBDC white paper. A separate session set out the Tashkent International Financial Centre, to operate under English common law with an independent regulator and commercial court, targeting at least $25 billion in investment and more than 10,000 jobs within five years.

The day then traced the failures of cross-border payments: divergent standards, divergent anti-money-laundering regimes, foreign exchange controls, and correspondent chains in which every hop adds cost and delay. The stakes are structural, with remittances equivalent to around 15 percent of GDP in Uzbekistan and 46 percent in Tajikistan. Sergio Mello of Anchorage Digital noted that only 18 currencies settle on CLS, and David Kleiman of Klearium drew a substantial show of hands when he asked how many present had lost a correspondent bank in five years.

The main disclosure came in the afternoon. Nodirbek Achilov, a Deputy Chairman of the Central Bank of Uzbekistan, set out a wholesale central bank digital currency acting as the settlement layer beneath privately issued stablecoins from licensed institutions, researched with GFTN, with a white paper ready for publication and the private leg being tested at small scale. A presidential decree in late 2025 had already established the two-tier structure. The sequencing is the inverse of the American approach, which has legislated for private dollar stablecoins while ruling out a retail CBDC.

The closing session set the reform record against the funding picture as Marius Dan of Franklin Templeton pointed to the May listing of UZNIF, which raised $603.6 million across London and Tashkent, or $692 million including the over-allotment, with the shares since trading at a premium to net asset value. Roman Rybalkin of S&P Global Ratings noted the November 2025 upgrade to BB while cautioning that gold and remittance income, both cyclical, underpin much of the recent run.

Day Two: Stablecoin Data, AI Accountability, and Fraud

The second day produced the forum’s most cited figure. Mu Changchun, Director-General of the Digital Currency Institute at the People’s Bank of China, presented monitoring across 36 stablecoins on 16 public chains, finding that transactions with a genuine payment behind them account for less than one percent of volume, the rest being internal rebalancing, protocol-level splitting and speculative turnover. A McKinsey and Artemis Analytics study published in January reached a comparable figure independently. His prescription was to “establish the rules before you pave the channels”.

The Central Bank of Uzbekistan’s Monetary Policy Director, Samigjon Inogamov, framed the open questions as measurement rather than backing, since a token moving between wallets never touches a bank account and so never enters the regulator’s statistics: “That is why we approach to observe before we scale.” A representative of the National Agency of Prospective Projects confirmed pilots on stablecoin payments and tokenised securities, while noting that no jurisdiction has yet fully regulated a tokenised securities market.

Keynotes from Dr Patrick Njoroge and Dr Veerathai Santiprabhob, former governors of the central banks of Kenya and Thailand, both argued that infrastructure precedes product. Njoroge warned that conflicting US and EU crypto frameworks risk spilling into third jurisdictions; Veerathai said the technology is often the easiest part to obtain. A Central Bank cybersecurity official later described a fraud in which an impersonator appeared on a video call posing as a bank department director.

Day Three: Islamic Finance and an Industry that Cannot Size Itself

The final day, programmed as The Azimuth, followed legislation. President Shavkat Mirziyoyev signed Law ZRU-1126 on 27 March 2026, effective 29 June, creating a dual banking system in which standalone Islamic banks operate alongside Islamic windows inside conventional banks, establishing a Council for Islamic Finance under the Central Bank, and introducing VAT exemptions for sukuk and Islamic leasing. The Central Bank amended its licensing rules in July and is preparing a national Islamic finance roadmap to 2030 with the Islamic Financial Services Board.

The opening dialogue challenged the assumption that weak demand constrains Islamic finance, arguing the binding constraint is infrastructure. Nearly 500 Islamic fintech firms operate across 41 countries, with 80 percent concentrated in ten markets, while India’s UPI scaled from zero to more than 20 billion monthly transactions in under a decade. Panellists ranked legal frameworks, Shariah governance and a common payment standard ahead of liquidity or deposit insurance. An official from the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas argued for licensing a pilot Islamic bank within twelve months rather than waiting for a perfect framework, while a Shariah board chair countered that digital tools cannot substitute for Ijtihad.

The Secretary-General of the Islamic Financial Services Board pressed for standards ahead of scale, on the reasoning that getting them right avoids a decade spent retrofitting trust after a failure. Banking still accounts for close to 70 percent of global Islamic assets while capital markets and sukuk lack depth, and conventional banking took almost thirty years and a global crisis to write its own rulebook. Capacity was the other constraint, with Turkey having published its first participation finance strategy only in 2022.

The most direct exchange came after lunch, on whether Shariah compliance can be coded. Almost no hands rose when the room was asked whether AI should approve a routine murabaha credit sale. The panel held that AI cannot replace muftis or Shariah boards and must never issue fatwas. Technology can carry machine-readable controls, research and audit testing, while interpreting intent, handling exceptions and issuing final rulings stay with scholars. A 99 percent confidence score is insufficient if a single Shariah condition is breached, and every decision needs a named human principal. AAOIFI has begun work on governance standards for AI in Islamic finance, with an exposure draft expected in 2027.

The session that followed found the industry unable to agree on its own size. One major data provider put 2024 global Islamic finance assets at about $6 trillion; the Islamic Financial Services Board, working from regulators’ returns, put the same year at $3.9 trillion, with most of the $2.1 trillion gap being Iranian banking assets included by one side and excluded by the other. Panellists agreed that sukuk has passed $1 trillion, with growth increasingly coming from Central Asia and Africa, and that the sector is not homogeneous, since what qualifies as acceptable in Malaysia often does not in Saudi Arabia or the UAE. For a new market such as Uzbekistan, the recommendation was early sukuk issuance.

The forum closed with the Central Bank of Uzbekistan and GFTN signing an expression of intent setting a shared course for an Islamic digital economy. It names two areas for joint work: a cross-border regulatory sandbox built on open standards and shared reference tools, and coordinated customer education across markets.

The Targets Uzbekistan Is Working Toward

The investment sessions set out the targets for 2030 which include licensed fintech companies from around 100 toward 200, $1 billion in foreign investment into fintech, and more than 5,000 trained professionals. A $50 million Central Bank venture fund sits behind the first, and digital payment adoption already runs above 70 percent in a population averaging 29 years old. Its first unicorn, Uzum, is valued at approximately $2.3 billion.

Sopnendu Mohanty of GFTN said “Uzbekistan has the ingredients to become Central Asia’s digital finance gateway”, with the next step being conversion of those foundations into corridors and partnerships. Ishmetov’s invitation to investors was shorter. “Build here. Test new solutions here. Invest here. Develop talent here.”

What the Forum Did Not Settle

Four questions ran across the three days without being resolved. Measurement came first, with the Central Bank unable to see stablecoin flows in its statistics. Tokenised securities came second, with no jurisdiction having solved the execution of shareholder rights. Measurement returned on the final day as a $2.1 trillion disagreement over the size of Islamic finance itself. And concentration came fourth, in Islamic fintech, where most firms sit in ten countries, and in Uzbekistan’s remittance base, where Russia supplied around 78 percent of inflows in 2025, falling to 72.4 percent by early 2026.

The forum is positioned as the start of an annual platform. On the evidence of three days, the near-term tests are whether the CBDC white paper is published, whether the sandbox produces measurable stablecoin data, whether the first Islamic banking licences are issued, and whether the fintech licence count moves toward 200.

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