Bank of Russia proposes to give digital assets a special legal status

The regulator presented its initiatives in a report for public consultation

07.11.2022 - 14:30

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2 min

What’s new? The Bank of Russia has released a report for public consultations entitled “Development of the Digital Asset Market in the Russian Federation.” It presents proposals for improving the regulation of digital rights, aimed at developing the digital asset market while protecting the interests of citizens and businesses and making these instruments more attractive to investors and issuers. The full version of the document is available on the regulator’s website.

The full version of the report

Main theses. Russian authorities have chosen a model of direct regulation of digital assets, providing for their separation into a separate object of regulation with a special legal status, and without assuming the qualification of digital assets as a digital representation of traditional financial instruments.

The authors of the report listed what instruments they consider possible to issue as digital financial assets in Russia. Among them are traditional financial instruments, third-party debt, tokenized precious metals and stones, as well as “titular” non-fungible tokens (NFTs) certifying the ownership of a thing or an exclusive right.

In this, despite the advantages of reducing the role of intermediaries and automating the execution of transactions through distributed ledger technologies, the use of digital assets can be fraught with risks, the authors stressed.

The report also notes that Russia has already formed the legislative and regulatory framework necessary to create the digital rights market.

In October, the first digital financial asset (DFA) for a basket of precious metals was issued on the Atomyze platform. It included gold, silver, platinum, palladium, rhodium, iridium, and ruthenium. Later, the media reported that brokers may appear on the Russian market of DFAs to perform secondary transactions in the over-the-counter segment. Anatoly Aksakov, chairman of the State Duma Committee on the Financial Market, believes that 2023 will be the “year of DFAs” in Russia.

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