Russia not ready for Bitcoin – Peskov

Dmitry Peskov, press secretary of Russian President Vladimir Putin, has said that Russia has no reason to recognise Bitcoin.

After El Salvador became the first country to adopt the digital coin as legal tender, he said that it didn’t bring benefits for the country.

In a statement to the press, Peskov noted he is convinced that such a move would not bring any benefits to the Russian Federation as well.

He added that Bitcoin is a quasi-currency and that equating it to official monetary instruments wouldn’t do anything but harm Russia’s financial and economic system.

“Clearly, Russia is not ready for such steps,” he emphasised.

According to the RIA Novosti news agency, the statement from Peskov came as the Republic of El Salvador became the world’s first country to recognise Bitcoin (BTC) as legal tender for payments. However, after that happened, the price of Bitcoin crashed to its lowest level in nearly a month, falling from $52,000 to $43,000.

According to the opposition, the fall caused one of Latin America’s poorest countries to lose $3 million.

Last week, Sberbank said it plans to register its blockchain platform with the Bank of Russia by mid-September and added it has already created functionality in issuing digital financial assets (DFA) of third parties.

Ruble as the only legal tender

Russia seems to be a long way from accepting any cryptocurrency as legal tender. Moscow partially regulated coins and tokens with the law dubbed “On Digital Financial Assets” which become legally valid at the beginning of this year. Its provisions say cryptocurrencies are property but forbid their use for payments.

According to the country’s current legislation, the national fiat ruble remains the only legal tender.

However, in May this year, Russian media reported that members of the State Duma, the lower house of Russia’s parliament, had started working on amendments to the Civil Code that would permit the use of crypto assets as contractual means of payment.

Also, back in 2017, Putin claimed that his country would issue CryptoRuble, a state-sponsored cryptocurrency. The national digital currency was expected to start live transactions in 2022 after testing in the latter half of 2021. Still, it wouldn’t completely act as a cryptocurrency as it would not be mined but instead issued by the Russian government.

Anatoly Aksakov, chairman of the Russian State Duma Committee on Financial Markets, recently stated that Russian lawmakers are now considering recognising the crypto mining industry as a form of entrepreneurship under local business laws, TASS news agency reported.