Russian regulators will develop mechanism for cross-border payments in cryptocurrency

What’s new? Russia’s Ministry of Finance jointly with the Federal Financial Monitoring Service (Rosfinmonitoring) and the Bank of Russia on the instructions of Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin are developing the draft law that will regulate the issuance, circulation, and other operations with digital assets. The departments are also discussing international payments in cryptocurrency. In an interview with Interfax, a spokesperson for Rosfinmonitoring said that the regulators’ work on the project will be completed by the end of this year.

Interfax’s material

What else did the regulators add? At the current stage, the draft law already includes both local infrastructure for trading digital currencies and regulation of mining. In this, the press service of the Ministry of Finance noted that cryptocurrency mining is considered a separate regulatory area.

“Different variations of taxation on mining are being discussed, but in general, the approach on which there is some consensus is: mining should be taxed when converting digital currency to fiat,” explained Ivan Chebeskov, Director of the Financial Policy Department of the Ministry of Finance.

Maxim Zotov, Vice-President of the Moskovskoye delovoye sobraniye, noted that in the current political situation, the authorities of the Russian Federation should allow citizens to use cryptocurrency to pay. At the same time, the Central Bank is against the use of cryptocurrencies as a means of payment within the country.

Ruslan Permyakov, Deputy Director of the NTI Competence Center “Trusted Interaction Technologies,” explained that there can only be two options for international payments. In the first case, a foreign company would have to set up an account in the Russian electronic currency system. In the second scenario, payments will take place through some cryptocurrency exchange.

Earlier, Chebeskov reported that the option of cross-border payments in cryptocurrency would appear in Russia as early as 2023. The companies will choose which cryptocurrency to trade in, and operations can be carried out on the Moscow and St. Petersburg exchanges.