Russia’s central bank recently said it wants to launch a pilot for the digital ruble next year, with plans to use a central bank digital currency (CBDC) for international payments.
Digital Ruble a Priority, Says Central Bank Governor
According to a Reuters report, Bank of Russia governor Elvira Nabiullina, speaking to the lower house of parliament, said that the central bank is preparing to launch “real-world digital ruble transactions” in 2023.
Nabiullina also said:
“The digital ruble is one of the priority projects. We have quite quickly developed a prototype… Now we are testing with banks and next year we will gradually do pilot transactions.
Russia has been working towards developing a CBDC for over a year. The central bank launched a prototype of the digital ruble platform in December 2021, with 12 commercial banks showing interest in participating in the pilot program.
Three of the 12 banks connected to the platform, with two fully digital ruble transfers between customers via mobile banking applications in February 2022.
In addition to the Digital Ruble project, Nabiullina said that Russia is looking at expanding the number of countries that accept the organization’s MIR banking cards. MIR is a local alternative payment system to Visa and MasterCard, both companies that have suspended operations in Russia following the invasion of Ukraine.
As previously reported by Cryptopotato, the ruble’s value fell after some Russian banks cut off from financial messaging giant SWIFT.
Binance restricts services in Russia after EU sanctions
Meanwhile, the latest development comes as Russia is being slammed with various economic sanctions. In the early days of the invasion of Ukraine, there were calls for cryptocurrency exchanges to stop serving Russian users, but at first some refused.
The United States is also keeping an eye on Russia to see if the country will use crypto to circumvent financial sanctions. In March, the US Deputy Secretary of the Treasury, Wally Ademo, and the President of the European Central Bank, Christine Lagarde, warned exchanges against aiding Russia to evade sanctions.
Recently, Binance announced that it will limit its services in Russia in line with new European Union (EU) sanctions. According to the cryptocurrency exchange giant, the platform will only serve “Russian citizens or natural persons residing in Russia, or legal entities established in Russia whose crypto assets exceed the value of 10,000 EUR.”
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