The central bank wants to ban investment in cryptocurrencies in Russia, as it sees risks to financial stability in the growing number of transactions with such assets, Reuters reported, citing two sources close to the regulator.
According to the agency’s interlocutors, the Central Bank is now negotiating a possible ban with market participants and experts. The measure may begin to act for new buyers of similar assets, but will not affect those who have purchased the cryptocurrency earlier, one of the sources said. Another said that the current position of the regulator is to “completely abandon” all cryptocurrencies.
The Central Bank, in response to a request from Reuters, announced the preparation of an advisory report outlining its position. The regulator did not say more about the content of the document.
According to the Central Bank, presented on November 25 this year, the annual volume of transactions of citizens with cryptocurrency is approximately $ 5 billion. Thus, Russians are one of the most active participants in this market. At the same time, the regulator recalled that transactions with such assets are associated with significant risks to financial stability and investors, because due to their decentralized nature, cryptocurrencies are used in criminal activities (for money laundering and drug trafficking) and are highly volatile. In addition, mining leads to increased electricity consumption, the Central Bank said.
The head of the regulator Elvira Nabiullina has repeatedly expressed this opinion. In addition, in August, the first deputy chairman of the Central Bank, Sergei Shvetsov, compared the acquisition of a cryptocurrency with entering a minefield. He explained that such funds are not protected by law, which means that if they are stolen, the state will not be able to help. On September 15, Shvetsov said that participants in the Russian banking system would begin to slow down people’s payments to crypto exchanges in order to protect the population from “emotional purchases” of cryptocurrency.
In early September, the press secretary of the Russian president, Dmitry Peskov, said that the country was not ready, following El Salvador, to recognize bitcoin as the official currency. He stressed then that such “quasi-currencies and de facto equating them with monetary instruments” can bring nothing but harm to the financial and economic systems.
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