Russia developed solution to automate DFA operations

What’s new? Tinkoff Business and Lighthouse, a fintech company, have developed a platform to automate digital financial assets (DFAs) transactions, which will be able to operate on the basis of nominal accounts. Data will be exchanged between the Lighthouse platform and the bank using the Tinkoff API protocols. According to the companies’ representatives, nominal accounts will eliminate the possibility of the issuance of DFAs without actual cash payment and will make transactions transparent not only for market participants but also for the Bank of Russia. Kommersant reports about this.

Material by Kommersant

What else is known about the new technology? It will simplify the initial sale of DFAs, i.e. transactions between issuers and investors. Thus, to buy DFAs on the Lighthouse platform, an investor will be able to transfer funds to a nominal account opened by the digital asset operator at Tinkoff Business. The money will be transferred to the DFA issuer account once the transaction is verified.

In this, the Bank of Russia maintains registers of issuers and exchange operators of DFAs. Atomyze, Lighthouse, and SberBank currently have issuer licenses, while there is not a single participant in the second one. In this regard, the new technology is not yet capable of solving the DFA exchange problem.

The CEO of Lighthouse Denis Iordanidi said that

“the use of a nominee account in DFA transactions will allow in the future to automate settlements within the information system and, due to API, make interaction with the bank seamless without the need to manually create payment orders during transactions.”

On May 16, the head of the State Duma Committee on the Financial Market Anatoly Aksakov said that the first DFAs could appear before the end of 2022. Three platforms for the issuance of digital financial assets had already been registered in Russia and two more were being prepared for launch.

Russia unveiled an industrial blockchain platform, CELLS, which could provide an alternative to the SWIFT system. The new solution is designed to create an ecosystem of software products and services based on distributed ledger technology.