Vitalii Shapran, a former member of the National Bank’s board, believes that the National Bank should have sought public input on the design of the 2,000-hryvnia banknote and conducted a survey on the matter.
He wrote about this on Facebook, according to the Ukrainian News agency.
Shapran noted that both the European Central Bank and the Central Bank of the russian federation conducted public surveys when introducing new currency symbols or banknotes. The National Bank of Ukraine, however, did not conduct such a survey.
“Even in backward Russia, where there is no democracy and a dictatorship thrives in forms sometimes worse than those of the USSR, for some reason the country’s central bank is interested in citizens’ opinions on what should be depicted on the banknotes used in cash circulation… What, then, is the secret of central banks? Why are they (except for our NBU) so interested in the public’s opinion regarding the appearance of banknotes? And they are interested in this regardless of the level of democratic development,” he wrote.
Shapran added that the secret isn’t complicated: money has a prescriptive nature; its nature is guaranteed not so much by law as by the belief of the people (the country’s population) that money will be accepted as a means of payment. In other words, if you go to a store, you need to be confident that they will accept your money there. This is the very foundation of monetary circulation. The public’s trust in money is a complex phenomenon that depends not only on economic or financial factors, but also on things such as experience, practicality, appearance, and so on.
“The public is the central bank’s client, for whom it issues money. That is precisely why consulting the public on the appearance of banknotes is a tradition rooted in an important factor that forms the foundation of any country’s monetary circulation. In principle, everything I’ve outlined above is known to any second- or third-year economics student taking the course ‘Money and Credit,’” added the former member of the National Bank’s board.
As the Ukrainian News agency earlier reported, Vitalii Shapran believes that putting the 2,000-hryvnia banknote into circulation will irritate the poor segments of the population.
Andrii Pyshnyi, the Governor of the National Bank of Ukraine, announced the expansion of the national currency’s denomination range—a new 2,000-hryvnia banknote will be introduced into circulation on September 4, 2026.
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