On its list of approved issuers of digital financial assets, the Central Bank of Russia (CBR) has now included a new organisation. According to the reports, the Central Bank of Russia has added the organisation Distributed Registry Systems, which operates the Masterchain platform, to the list of operators of information systems that may be used to issue digital financial assets (DFAs).
To this point, registration has been made for four more issuers. They include the fintech firm Lighthouse, the tokenization service Atomyze, the main state-owned and private banks in the Russian Federation, Sberbank, and Alfa-Bank. The “Masterchain” platform is now the fifth “information system operator” authorised by law to tokenize conventional assets and coordinate their exchange in the nation.
An IT firm called Distributed Registry Systems was founded in April 2021 and is focused on creating blockchain-based solutions for the transportation, logistics, and other industries. The Association “Fintech,” a number of major Russian banks, the Moscow Stock Exchange, and others founded it.
As per the press release, the business first proposes to issue digital financial assets for rights to financial claims, either in the form of bonds that are not tied to specific assets or as structural instruments related to various assets. The platform will eventually host the introduction of additional DFA kinds. Moscow Credit Bank, the largest private regional bank in Russia, said earlier this month that it had utilised Masterchain to issue the country’s first digital bank guarantee in Chinese yuan.
With the implementation of the “On Digital Financial Assets” law in Russia in January 2021, DFAs, or digital assets with an issuing company, became subject to regulation. The State Duma, the lower house of the Russian government, approved a measure in its first reading in February of this year that will let companies that operate financial platforms to also create and oversee blockchain platforms.
While the US has issued a wave of sanctions directed at Russia’s banks and state-owned corporations, notably money transfers through the traditional banking system, the European Union has already declared penalties against “Kremlin interests” in Russia. There is growing agreement that Russian organisations may employ cryptocurrencies to lessen the effects of these restrictions. Many think that in order to mitigate the effects, Russian banks and billionaires may invest in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.
Nonetheless, decentralised digital currencies like bitcoin are not yet regulated in Russia. Support for legalising at least certain crypto activities, such as cross-border transfers, has grown in Moscow under Western sanctions imposed over the invasion of Ukraine, particularly financial limitations.