The bank of Russia doesn’t want to enable Bitcoin for regular Russian people, but rather exclusively for foreign trade entities.
Elvira Nabiullina, the head of Russia’s central bank, indicated that the institution is prepared to think about permitting cryptocurrency use domestically, but only as part of a legal experiment.
“It’s possible to consider transactions through an authorized organization in the country as part of an experimental legal regime, but that would require a relevant law,”
Nabiullina stated during a Bank of Russia press conference on Dec. 16. Nabiullina noted that the Bank of Russia’s main concern about cryptocurrency has always been that it cannot be used as a payment method.
She continued by saying that due to the extreme volatility of the cryptocurrency market, the central bank is especially worried about investor protection.
Although it is not technically against the law for Russians to invest in cryptocurrencies, according to Bank of Russia deputy governor Alexey Zabotkin, the Bank of Russia thinks that widespread use of cryptocurrencies would inevitably result in their usage as a form of payment. He declared:
“If you allow free circulation of cryptocurrency as an investment tool within the country, then inevitably, with the expansion of its ownership, it will become more widely used as a means of payment. It will be impossible to prevent this.”
As such, if adopted, Russia’s experimental regime will be used in favor of cryptocurrency usage within Russia, but “only to support foreign trade,” Zabotkin stressed.
The most recent information sheds some light on why the Russian central bank has been so opposed to the use of cryptocurrencies as investment instruments there.
The usage of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin (BTC $16,808) was expressly forbidden by Russia’s primary cryptocurrency regulation, “On Digital Financial Assets.” for 2020 payment purposes.
Although local cryptocurrency exchanges are still unregulated, the law did not forbid Russians from investing in cryptocurrencies. The Russian government does not want to miss out on the advantages of decentralization on a global scale, even as it is unwilling to permit Russians to use decentralized financial instruments like Bitcoin locally.
Vladimir Putin, the president, blasted the monopoly in international financial payment systems at the end of November and called for a decentralized, blockchain-based settlement network
