Uzbekistan Launches HUMO Stablecoin Pilot with 20 Merchants Under Regulatory Oversight

Uzbekistan is running a live payments test. The country’s first government bond-backed stablecoin, called HUMO, is now moving through a formal pilot with more than 20 merchants, a 12-month trial window, and two of the country’s most powerful financial regulators watching every transaction.

Humo Digital sits at the center of it all. The company was officially registered by the National Agency for Prospective Projects, known as NAPP, on Monday, marking the formal start of a program that’s been quietly building since late last year. The stablecoin is pegged one-to-one with the Uzbek som and backed by government securities — a design choice meant to keep the token stable and give users a reason to trust it. Asterium, a licensed crypto exchange, is a key partner in the operation, handling much of the infrastructure needed to make the payments work. The Central Bank of Uzbekistan is co-supervising alongside NAPP, and the two agencies plan to monitor compliance and risk in real time throughout the trial.

The trial runs 12 months. But the full project could stretch to three years.

What Regulators Are Actually Watching

It’s not just about whether the payments go through. Regulators are scrutinizing a pretty wide set of risk factors — collateral adequacy, cybersecurity, consumer protection, anti-money laundering measures, and potential impacts on both financial and price stability. That’s a serious checklist, and it tells you something about how cautious Uzbekistan’s authorities are being here.

No formal approvals exist beyond the pilot phase. That’s worth saying clearly. Whatever merchants and consumers experience over the next 12 months, nothing gets scaled or expanded until the regulators say so. The authorities are paying close attention to outcomes before any final decisions get made. Probably smart, given how many stablecoin experiments elsewhere have run into trouble with exactly the kinds of risks on that list.

The pilot’s design requires the HUMO token to maintain its peg to the som at all times, with government securities as backing. Keeping that backing transparent and reliable is one of the central concerns regulators have flagged. It’s basically the whole credibility argument for the token — if the collateral looks shaky at any point, confidence collapses fast. So the evaluation process includes not just technical performance but the economic mechanics of the backing itself.

Blockchain Infrastructure and the Merchant Testing Ground

More than 20 merchants are participating, testing HUMO payments across various goods and services. That’s a decent-sized sample. The diversity of merchants matters because it gives regulators and Humo Digital real-world data across different transaction types, different consumer behaviors, and different operational conditions. A stablecoin that works fine at one kind of merchant but breaks down at another isn’t ready for anything broader.

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The pilot also aims to integrate blockchain infrastructure with the payment-processing systems of participating banks. Asterium’s role as a licensed crypto exchange partner is central here — the company brings the technical framework for managing digital currency transactions securely and efficiently. Blockchain’s transparency and traceability are part of why it’s being used, and the pilot will assess whether those properties hold up under real commercial conditions.

It’s worth noting that Uzbekistan didn’t just invent this framework on the fly. A regulatory sandbox structure was approved in November 2025, and that framework specifically allowed for stablecoin payment trials. It also included provisions for tokenized shares and bonds, which means HUMO isn’t the only digital asset experiment the country has in mind. The sandbox exists precisely to let regulators and participants navigate unfamiliar financial territory without blowing up the broader system if something goes wrong.

Stablecoin adoption has grown sharply across Central Asia and other emerging markets in recent years, driven partly by currency volatility concerns and partly by a genuine demand for faster, cheaper payment rails. Uzbekistan’s approach — government-backed, tightly regulated, sandbox-confined — is more conservative than what’s happened in some other markets, but that’s kind of the point. The country wants the data before it commits.

NAPP’s registration of Humo Digital wasn’t a rubber stamp. The agency is taking a strategic role in pushing digital financial solutions forward while keeping the central bank close. That combination of innovation agency and monetary authority working together is probably the most important structural detail of the whole program. It means the pilot can move with some ambition but can’t drift too far from regulatory guardrails.

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Ongoing assessments will run throughout the 12-month trial. The Central Bank and NAPP will track compliance, flag risks, and collect data that feeds into whatever comes next. Future decisions on expanding stablecoin use in Uzbekistan depend heavily on what those evaluations turn up. The insights from merchant transactions — consumer behavior patterns, operational friction points, security incidents if any — will shape the regulatory and policy thinking that follows.

The pilot covers issuance, circulation, and redemption. All three phases get tested.