MOSCOW (Realist English). The financial authorities of Russia have been shelving this issue since 2019. All this time, the populist discussion of the Ministry of Finance, the Central Bank and commercial banks continued around the theoretical crypto ruble with condescending jokes about those who demanded the creation of a national digital currency yesterday. The economic storm forced the schemers to portray feverish activity.
In March 2023, the bill was miraculously adopted in the first reading by the State Duma. And the main provisions of the law were supposed to come into force from April 1. But something went wrong again. The veil was slightly opened by the head of the State Duma Committee on the Financial Market Anatoly Aksakov, speaking at the St. Petersburg International Judicial Forum, which is taking place these days.
According to him, opponents of the bill demand to define what the digital ruble is: “We proceeded from the fact that we have the ruble, it has already been defined as a monetary means of payment in the Russian Federation and it is not necessary to define it, just a different digital form arises and that’s it.” It looks like an outright attempt at sabotage through letter-eating.
And the second claim, according to Aksakov, refers to digital wallets. This is closer to the essence of the conflict. By law, the Central Bank is the only regulator that issues the crypto ruble, and it is also a party to the digital account agreement. “We also call it a digital purse, but there are already a lot of critics who say that the word “purse” should not be used,” Aksakov explained.
The fact is that the presence of a digital purse will allow you to freely send funds to any counterparty anywhere in the world, bypassing the credit institution. At the same time, the transaction will be protected by blockchain technology. Credit structures in this scenario are just “exchange offices” where the client will be able to exchange his conditional million ordinary rubles for a million digital ones under the guarantee of the Central Bank. The regulator will deduct this amount from the bank’s account in order to simulate crypto rubles with subsequent crediting to the applicant’s purse. Merchants do not like the fact that transactions will go past the cash register. They want to snatch their parasitic percentage.
There is another pitfall, which Sergey Glazyev speaks directly about:
“The management of the Central Bank deliberately restricts the scope of the digital ruble only to deposit operations, in fact making this instrument purely passive. And it is needed, first of all, for credit operations. The digital ruble cannot be stolen or used for the wrong purpose, for which it is provided on credit at a preferential rate. Artificial intelligence will provide control over the targeted use of digital rubles both in the credit sphere and in public procurement, in all preferential financial mechanisms, including social benefits. So it is necessary to introduce digitized non-cash rubles, first of all, in the credit and budgetary spheres.”
The expert suggests learning how to build a national cryptocurrency on the example of India.
