The Central Bank creates a national cryptocurrency

The Bank of Russia is creating a national virtual currency, Interfax reports with reference to the Deputy Chairman of the Central Bank Olga Skorobogatova.

According to Skorobogatova, we are talking about a national currency, which can be presented not only in paper form, but also in electronic format. The Bank of Russia promises to reveal the details of the project in 2-3 years.

“Of course, we need to create a national virtual currency. This is the future. A question of specific timing. We will definitely reach a virtual national currency, we have already started working on this,” Skorobogatova said.

Skorobogatova noted that the Bank of Russia has already tested distributed registry technologies for large volumes of information on the Mastyerchain and Hyperledger platforms. The Central Bank will present regulatory documents on the taxation of cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin, within a month.

Currently, Russian legislation regarding cryptocurrencies is not fully formulated. Previously, the Bank of Russia proposed regulating cryptocurrencies as a digital product. The Ministry of Finance proposed to introduce criminal liability for the issuance of money surrogates, including cryptocurrencies, but the department’s initiatives did not receive support.

Plans to issue a national cryptocurrency were previously discussed in the UK, Singapore and China. In May 2016, Kommersant reported that the Ministry of Finance and the Central Bank were discussing the introduction of virtual currency. The head of the Central Bank, Elvira Nabiullina, warned about the risks of using cryptocurrencies to conduct dubious transactions, including the financing of terrorism.

Cryptocurrencies are distinguished by the fact that their accounting is decentralized and occurs using a distributed network. As a rule, transaction data in cryptocurrencies is not encrypted. The most popular cryptocurrency is Bitcoin . Depending on the country, cryptocurrencies are considered a means of payment, a specific product, and may have restrictions on circulation (for example, a ban on transactions with them for banking institutions).