There is no large-scale business product based on DLT, apart from certain cryptocurrencies, says Olga Skorobogatova, Deputy Governor at the Bank of Russia.
Blockchain technologies have encountered the skepticism of Olga Skorobogatova, Deputy Governor at the Central Bank of Russia. Speaking at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum 2018, Ms Skorobogatova, quoted by RIA Novosti, said that the blockchain technology is not mature enough yet and requires further improvements, especially with regard to safety.
She noted that there is no large-scale business solution based on distributed ledger technologies in the world, apart from Bitcoin and certain cryptocurrencies. According to Ms Skorobogatova, the business has not yet found out the advantage of the transition to blockchain. And “technology for sake of technology” is pointless, she said.
In the face of this rather skeptical stance, the Bank of Russia has been seeking to support new financial technologies. In April this year, the “Megaregulator” announced the launch of a regulatory sandbox, which welcomes all entities that develop or use innovative services whose implementation requires regulatory changes.
The sandbox will work as a platform for modeling the processes of the use and application of innovative financial services, products and technologies. Checks of the positive effects of their implementation will be carried out. Based on the results of the pilot, the service may be approved and then a plan will be elaborated for the implementation of this new service.
The Bank says that any organization that has developed or plans to use an innovative financial service may initiate a pilot on the regulatory sandbox.
Meanwhile, the Russian authorities appear to disagree on the future regulation of cryptocurrencies. The Russian government has filed its official response to the “Digital Financial Assets” bill submitted by the Finance Ministry in March this year. The bill, which aims to fit cryptocurrencies, tokens, mining and related operations in the Russian legal system, faced a set of objections from the government.
For instance, according to the government, the bill does not propose how to handle the taxation and accounting issues related to cryptocurrency activities in Russia. There are also gaps in the bill with regard to any enforcement action against cryptocurrency criminals due to the lack of a specified mechanism for identifying the owners of the digital financial assets and the individuals responsible for the functioning of the the digital financial asset systems.
