Russia Plans to Offer International Crypto Payment Options, Says Finance Ministry Official

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The draft bill on dig­i­tal cur­ren­cies pre­pared by the Finance Min­istry should cre­ate a frame­work for cryp­to set­tle­ments, a state­ment by a Russ­ian offi­cial con­firmed on Sept. 19.

Inter­fax quot­ed the head of the Finance Ministry’s Finan­cial Pol­i­cy Depart­ment, Ivan Chebeskov, stat­ing that the draft bill on dig­i­tal cur­ren­cies will out­line a list of cur­ren­cies and coun­ter­par­ty coun­tries for a set­tle­ment frame­work. He added, “The Min­istry of Finance has devel­oped a bill on dig­i­tal cur­ren­cies. It is com­pre­hen­sive and includes many things.”

“But in terms of pay­ments, we are rather cre­at­ing a mech­a­nism for busi­ness than build­ing this archi­tec­ture com­plete­ly, because it is not com­plete­ly clear how it should be reg­u­lat­ed, so we give busi­ness­es the oppor­tu­ni­ty with this bill to pay with cryp­tocur­ren­cy, but in terms of what cryp­tocur­ren­cies will be used, how to nego­ti­ate with coun­ter­par­ties, with which coun­tries it will oper­ate — all this we are leav­ing to entre­pre­neurs,” Chebeskov said.

Global sanctions led to crypto push 

Inter­na­tion­al sanc­tions crip­pled Russia’s econ­o­my after the coun­try invad­ed Ukraine. Now, it seems like the gov­ern­ment is seek­ing to avoid the penal­ties by legal­iz­ing cryp­tocur­ren­cy use in cross-bor­der payments.

Be[In]Crypto recent­ly not­ed that the Russ­ian Min­istry of Finance and the Bank of Rus­sia said they are revis­ing their pol­i­cy and seem to sup­port using dig­i­tal wal­lets to make cross-bor­der payments.

Entre­pre­neurs “will bet­ter fig­ure it out and under­stand what will work and what will not,” Chebeskov not­ed fur­ther. “When a large num­ber of peo­ple deal with this issue, some cor­rect solu­tion is found over time, bet­ter than if we [the author­i­ties] pro­posed some solu­tion that would not work for many. It will be on the side of business[es] to decide on the spec­trum of how it should func­tion,” the offi­cial said.

“And if this needs to be raised to some inter­gov­ern­men­tal lev­el, then, of course, we will also get involved and pro­mote it some­how as part of inter­na­tion­al coop­er­a­tion. But rather, since there are already requests from the busi­ness, we expect that this will be work that busi­ness has either already done or will do in the future,” Chebeskov added.

Finance ministry didn’t agree with central bank ban proposal

Notably, back in June, the first trans­ac­tion involv­ing a fin­tech com­pa­ny and a cash-backed dig­i­tal finan­cial asset was car­ried out by VTB, one of the biggest state banks in Rus­sia. In the trans­ac­tion, engi­neer­ing com­pa­ny Metrowag­on­mash was tok­enized on Lighthouse’s plat­form, build­ing fears of Rus­sia cir­cum­vent­ing sanc­tions with sim­i­lar transactions.

Recent­ly, state-owned media agency TASS quot­ed Deputy Finance Min­is­ter Alex­ei Moi­seev stat­ing that Rus­sia is work­ing with some friend­ly coun­tries to cre­ate clear­ing plat­forms for cross-bor­der set­tle­ments in sta­ble­coins backed by real assets.” We are cur­rent­ly work­ing with a num­ber of coun­tries to cre­ate bilat­er­al plat­forms and not to use dol­lars and euros,” Moi­seev stated.

The change in stance comes after the Russ­ian cen­tral bank released a paper dis­cussing the role of cryp­tocur­ren­cy in the Russ­ian finan­cial sec­tor, propos­ing a ban on its usage, trad­ing, and min­ing at the start of this year.

How­ev­er, the Russ­ian finance min­istry main­tained a con­trary view against a ban. Finance Min­is­ter Anton Silu­anov stat­ed in Feb­ru­ary that his min­istry believes cryp­to should be legal­ized and taxed instead.

In this regard, Chebeskov said, “The cur­rent restric­tions are a dri­ver for us to use these tech­nolo­gies, includ­ing as a new mech­a­nism for inter­na­tion­al pay­ments. But in my opin­ion, this is only a part of all the oppor­tu­ni­ties that both dig­i­tal finan­cial assets and dig­i­tal cur­ren­cies can provide,”

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