At the end of March, the chairman of the Energy Committee of the Russian Congress, Pavel Zablani, announced at a press conference that Russia is open to accepting Bitcoin for its natural resource exports.
“When it comes to our ‘friendly’ countries, like China or Turkey, that are not pressuring us, then we have been offering them for some time to transfer payments to national currencies, like the ruble and the yuan,” Zablani said.
“With Turkey, it could be the pound and the ruble. Or it could also be a variety of currencies, and that’s a perfectly acceptable practice. If they want Bitcoin, then we’ll trade Bitcoin.”
And while until recently the demands focused on “rubles for gas”, so the ruble also soared to peaks, today the Interfax news agency seems to cite a senior government official who announced on Friday that Russia is also considering allowing regular use of cryptocurrencies as a key tool for processing international payments.
“The idea of ​ †‹using digital currencies in transactions for international arrangements is under active discussion,” said Ivan Chevskov, head of the financial policy department of the Russian Ministry of Finance.
Discussions have been going on for months, and although the government expects cryptocurrencies to be legally regulated as a means of payment sooner or later, no agreement has yet been reached.
Meanwhile, the Russian Ministry of Finance is discussing adding the proposal on international payments to an updated version of a new draft law on the subject, which means the proposal has moved from ‘idea’ to an operation already underway, Vedomosti newspaper reported on Friday, quoting government officials.
Allowing crypto to become a means of international trade arrangements will help deal with the impact of Western sanctions, which have made Russia’s approach to traditional cross-border payment mechanisms become “limited,” Chebskov said.
Russia’s openness to accept Bitcoin has changed the momentum that exists in the country, which until last year rejected outright the acceptance of digital or cryptographic currencies as valuable.
“I believe it has value,” Putin said at the time, referring to Bitcoin, “but I do not believe it can be used in the oil trade,” he said in a statement.
The current size of the Bitcoin market and its liquidity do raise questions about whether this currency can be widely used by international trade countries.
However, as noted earlier, by being open to the possibility and ultimately making deals with interested parties, Russia could be the stage for an imminent trend in which countries choose to make deals in the stateless global monetary system.