Tunisia Denies CBDC Reports: Here Is How the False News Spread

The CBDC - dubbed the "uDinar" by Universa Hub Africa, though similar projects have used the term "eDinar" - was set to be state-owned and backed by paper money, the reports claimed.

The news pieces noted that Universa was set to receive a percentage of all transactions carried out with the uDinar, and the ledger would be visible to the country's central bank.

Once the news cycle started, when media reports alleging that Tunisia had become the first country to issue a CBDC surfaced, Universa itself began to circulate since-debunked reports, sharing links on its social media channels, including Twitter and Telegram.

Titled "URGENT: Tunisia issues state e-currency CBDC on Universa," the letter contained a link to the above mentioned Iz.ru news piece.

Borodich argued in the press release that on Nov. 7, Universa Hub Africa launched uDinar, backed by the Tunisian dinar, as a proof of concept and that "No question of CBDC émission related to uDinar was discussed at the Forex Club Tunisie Congress."

Borodich evaded answering why Universa posted links to the original reports on its social media channels, contacted Cointelegraph via email implying that it was newsworthy material, posted one of those links on his private Facebook feed, and told an interviewer that "Tunisia launched, using our technology, the national digital currency."

Universa's token, UTNP, experienced a pump that lasted throughout the first news cycle and traded at almost $0.007 during its peak, according to data from Coin360.

"It wasn't only the media that reported the news wrong, it was also Universa's team that reported the news wrong," a user nicknamed Uly55 wrote at the time.

"From my understanding it was the news who grabbed the wrong news and then it spread fast, too fast for Universa to handle it."

The first reports on Tunisia experimenting with digital currencies date back to 2015, when Swiss software startup Monetas announced the pilot launch of eDinar, a digital currency developed in partnership with Tunisia's post office and local startup DigitUs.