The Russian government will debate the merits of cryptocurrency regulation in the next couple of months according to an announcement made this Monday by Anatoly Aksakov, the Head of the State Duma Committee on the Financial Market.
According to Aksakov, the rules will be put in place alongside new regulations governing investment and crowdfunding platforms. The Russian government is also planning to make changes to its civil code which will include the addition of cryptocurrency regulations.
Those regulations look set to govern the cryptocurrency marketplace, with rules likely to cover trading platforms and exchanges.
“The [new] law is a bill regulating the activities of electronic platforms [and] the marketplace,” said Aksakov. “I submitted this bill to the State Duma for consideration at the end of December. We have a plan to adopt this law by February 15 in order to launch a pilot project about 20 credit institutions and the Moscow Stock Exchange are preparing.”
Crypto regulations coming to Russia
Aksakov has been advocating for cryptocurrency rules since last year. Back in May of 2018, he submitted a bill to the Russian parliament that laid out some fairly simple standards that could be used to govern the cryptocurrency market.
That bill defined cryptocurrencies, whether they are utility or security tokens, as being property. It remains unclear, however, as to whether laws pertaining to property actually apply to cryptocurrencies in the world’s largest nation.
Alongside that particular definition, the laws set out in the bill also made a distinction between utility tokens and cryptocurrencies. For example, bitcoin would be classed as having ‘multiple issuers’ but, conversely, a token issued by a company would be classed as having a ‘single issuer.’
Finally, the bill said that cryptocurrency is not legal tender in the Russian Federation, though the implications of that aspect of the regulation are fairly minimal as most countries only recognize their own currency as legal tender.
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