Russian central bank objects to ruble pegged stablecoins. Senior officials at the Bank of Russia have come out against the question of private stablecoins attached to the Russian ruble. Sergei Shvetsov, the first Deputy Governor of the Russian Central Bank, said the Bank’s goal was to ban private firms from selling stable coins backed by the country’s fiat currency.
Shvetsov said that russian crypto developers will only be able to use the Bank of Russia’s digital ruble. According to a Nov. 30 report by local news agency Prime, he said that this approach follows the “philosophy of the means of payment’s uniqueness.”
Shvetsov referred to China’s digital yuan-related regulations that criminalize the issuance of yuan-backed stablecoins by third parties “China put a blanket ban on any yuan-pegged stablecoins. I think that we are not far from that. The bank will suppress everything that is positioned as a means of payment. We proceed from the premise that the ruble is the means of payment of the Russian Federation.”
Olga Skorobogatova, another first deputy governor of the Bank of Russia, underscored the technical difficulties of issuing a digital ruble She said, “So far, not a single regulator has figured out how to restore rubles in case the smartphone is lost, for example, but precisely due to the fact that […] technologies are developing, we understand for ourselves that this issue can be worked out at the second stage. […] Technologically, this problem will have to be solved.”
In October 2020, The Bank of Russia officially released a roadmap for the digital ruble. According to the bank, a digital ruble should become an additional form of money alongside cash.
[image: Wikimedia]
