Russia explores cross-border crypto payments
Russian authorities are working on a way to use cryptocurrencies for settlements with other nations amid sanctions related to the Russia-Ukraine war.
The country’s central bank and finance ministry have agreed on a draft law to regulate cross-border crypto payments, Bitcoin.com reported on Sunday (September 25). The authorities will regulate the issuance, circulation and various operations with digital assets by the end of the year, including international crypto payments.
Deputy Finance Minister Alexey Moiseev said his department and the Bank of Russia had agreed on new legislation. Earlier this month, the two institutions said that Russia “cannot do without cross-border crypto payments” due to the sanctions imposed on it by several countries due to the start of the war in Ukraine last February.
“The activities of organizations that will carry out exchange operations with digital currency, its transfer and storage, and providers of virtual asset services should be subject to regulation, including the registration or licensing of such persons and their supervision,” the Russian government’s financial intelligence agency Rosfinmonitoring said.
Since it started the war, Russia has had to find ways to operate in the face of global sanctions and condemnation. One of those ways is stablecoins, which can currently be used to make payments across national borders, according to state news agency Tass.
Learn more: Sanctions-busting Russian Stablecoin Would Test US Regulations
It comes as US lawmakers have long been concerned about the ways digital assets can be used to circumvent sanctions. The sanctions were led by the US and EU and have cut off Russia’s access to standard payment rails such as SWIFT.
Because of that, Russia has been working on new bilateral payment platforms that use “mutually acceptable tokenized instruments” to bypass the need to use dollars or euros for international settlements.
Moiseev said they are “essentially removing platforms that we are currently developing with these countries”.
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