The Central Bank of Russia has added a new entity to its listing of approved digital financial asset issuers. The platform, named ‘Masterchain,’ is the fifth ‘information system operator’ in the country that is officially allowed to tokenize traditional assets and organize their trading.
Russia Now Has Five Licensed Digital Asset Issuers
The Central Bank of Russia (CBR) has included the Distributed Registry Systems’ Masterchain platform in its register of operators of information systems granted permission to issue digital financial assets (DFAs), according to news outlet RBC.
Four other issuers have already been listed. These are the tokenization service Atomyze, the fintech company Lighthouse, and the two largest banks in the Russian Federation – Sberbank and Alfa-Bank.
Founded in April 2021, Distributed Registry Systems is an IT firm that provides blockchain-based solutions for the financial, transport, logistics, and other industries. It is jointly owned by several major Russian banks, Moscow Stock Exchange, and the Association “Fintech”.
At the start, the company has plans to issue digital financial assets for rights to monetary claims. These will be in the form of bonds that are either not tied to any particular assets or structured instruments connected to various assets, as outlined in a press release.
The Masterchain platform will then launch other types of digital financial assets in the future. This month, Moscow Credit Bank, the biggest private regional bank in Russia, announced the issuance of the country’s first digital bank guarantee denominated in Chinese yuan on the platform.
DFAs were regulated in Russia through the “On Digital Financial Assets” law which took effect in January 2021.
In February 2021, the State Duma, the lower house of the Russian parliament, passed a bill in its first reading which will give financial platform operators the right to develop and manage blockchain platforms.
Russia has yet to regulate decentralized cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin. In response to Western sanctions imposed for the invasion of Ukraine, which included financial sanctions, Moscow has increased its support for legalizing certain crypto operations, like cross-border payments.
Do you think Russia will continue to broaden its market for digital financial assets? Share your forecasts in the comments section below.
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