The Russian education board has announced it will include blockchain technology in the main graduation exam for university students, according to local media outlet TASS.

The Russian Federal Service for Supervision in the Sphere of Education and Science (Rosobrnadzor) is planning on implementing distributed ledger technology in the Unified State Exam (USE), which is the main preliminary exam to be sat in Russian universities.

Head of the Federal Service, Sergey Kravtsov, said: “We also talked about the use of blockchain technology in the USE, and this year this technology will be used in the USE, using new technologies of printing and scanning [of the exam].”

The Russian government has shown a keen interest in cryptocurrencies and blockchain over the past year. University lecturer Vladislav Ginko predicted that the government may invest “billions” into Bitcoin to mitigate against US sanctions.

He said: “De-dollarization is actually forced by US sanctions when Russia is going to be almost switched off from US payments for its oil and gas.

“Because of US and EU sanctions, Russian oligarchs were forced to immediately move their US denominated assets from abroad, and now they see Bitcoin is the best option to invest.”

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