By Shelly Melancon (Switzerland)
The Bank of Russia is collating a list of financial institutions that would run a first trial of the digital ruble. Today, the Bank of Russia officially revealed the creation of a pilot group (consisting of 12 Russian financial institutions) to trial the digital ruble.
Complete Testing to Start Early Next Year
The banks on this list include Tinkoff bank (the top private bank), Sberbank and Vtb (both state-owned banks and the biggest banks in Russia), Soyuz bank, Tkb, Skb-Bank, Dom.Rf, Ak Bars Bank, Rosbank, Promsvyazbank, Gazprombank, and Alfa-Bank (these last seven are leading commercial banks in the country). Russia’s apex bank hopes to finalize the model for its digital ruble platform before the end of the year and begin testing early next year.
This pilot stage of the trial will involve a release of the digital ruble and other basic features. The next step will be to allow more participants, add and test more features of the digital ruble. Olga Skorobogatova, the first Deputy Governor for the Bank of Russia, opined that the digital Ruble would decrease costs and increase the payment methods available for citizens to perform their transactions. Bank of Russia‘s official announcement for a CBDC plan was an October 2020 release of a consultation paper on developing the digital ruble.
Also read:The digital Ruble and the fiat Ruble would have equal importance and will be used to perform payment transactions interchangeably. The Bank of Russia argues that the digital Ruble will simplify and speed up payments. Also, it would have little or no cost of production.
A Russian CBDC Doesn’t Go Down Well with Everyone
Some influential citizens have criticized Russia’s apex bank for prioritizing the digital Ruble over common digital assets like Bitcoin and Ethereum. One of the critics, Oleg Deripaska (one of Russia‘s wealthiest men and the CEO of Tinkoff, a top private bank in the country), argued that the best option would have been for the Bank of Russia to implement policies. Thus, granting freedom for everyone to perform sales settlements in any payment option they desire.
He also opined that his bank (Tinkoff) couldn’t offer crypto-related services to its customers because of the apex bank’s regulations. Top Russian lawmaker (Fedot Tumusov) also criticized the apex bank for its refusal to allow crypto-related trading and services in the country.
China’s CBDC Progress Will Have a Huge Impact
Toshihide Endo, a former top Japanese financial regulator, has opined that the fast rate at which advanced countries adopt central bank digital currencies (CBDC) will depend on China’s progress in releasing and running its CBDC. China was the first country to start a CBDC trial, while other advanced countries remain skeptical about doing the same. However, the bank of Japan’s CBDC pilot program only started about two months ago.
Endo further said, “once china releases its CBDC fully, most other nations would be forced to make the same move. But China would have a huge advantage over them.”
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