Bitcoin Forum

Russia's National Settlement Depository (NSD), the central depository for Moscow Exchange, the largest exchange group in Russia, is developing a blockchain platform to provide deposit and settlement services for digital assets and cryptocurrencies.

Built in partnership with Waves Platform, the public blockchain project designed for the launch of distributed applications had previously said in a blog post that it had struck a deal to become the NSD's technological partner, at the time, noting that it had has already started developing a prototype.

In an announcement today, the NSD confirmed that the first prototype will be presented during the first half of next year.

The platform would enable the NSD to issue a cryptocurrency and cryptocurrency wallet available for banks, pension funds and retail investors, one which would also enable the exchange of those assets for fiat currencies.

Eddie Astanin, chairman of the executive board at NSD, said:

    "Our goal is to create a secure and user-friendly accounting infrastructure for digital assets. We consider the platform would not only provide technological and legal protection of all parties involved, but also extend variety of post-trade services for investors, custodians and new institutions emerging in this sector of economy."

However, while the blockchain startup touts that the project is technologically achievable, the company's founder and CEO Sasha Ivanov admitted the regulatory uncertainty – namely, the whether of whether the NSD would be legally allowed to deal with digital assets – poses a major challenge for the project deployment to market.

"Project implementation depends not only on technical development but on the development of a legislative framework that mitigates the risks of crypto asset ownership and ensures that the service is user-friendly," the statement reads.

As reported by CoinDesk, while a legal framework that would capture bitcoin in Russia is being discussed by the country's various central and financial authorities, no concrete regulatory proposals have been put forward so far.

Over the past a few years, Russia has taken a U-turn on its attitude towards cryptocurrency, moving from a possible ban to robust discussion and the exploration of use cases that could be adopted by government agencies.

https://www.coindesk.com/russias-central-depository-plans-build-cryptocurrency-wallet/?utm_content=bufferfa1ea&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

Russia's U-turn was inevitable. No country can today avoid cryptocurrencies. They are taking an important part in financial landscape and hence are unavoidable. Blockchain technology in itself is a great technology and like Russia many more countries are integrating it in their system. Many countries are also developing their own cryptocurrency because in that way they can reduce the dominance of Bitcoin in cryptocurrency market. But that is least to happen.

The big money bags have realized that there is good money to be made from the cryptocurrency markets. They have enough power to lobby and influence government decisions. So this U turn by the Russian government doesn't surprise me at all.

I am from Russia and follow all crypto news inside the country. I am very skeptical about the new idea of creating it's own crypto-currency to be honest. In the beginning of the year Russian Central bank announced about creation of our national crypto currency, but nothing happen, the same as with the law about bitcoin and crypto-currency regulation. so, while the law will not be released there will be problematical to release the new crypto-currency. But they promise that in the first half of the next year, maybe the situation abut crypto-regulation will be changed till that time. Let's see.

Thanks a lot for sharing your honest insider view on this development. Well, any country can issue its own cryptocurrency or even a multitude of cryptocurrencies in the same vein that it can issue its own national currency (the fiat money we have around for a long, long time). However, it should never forget that it can become a part of the larger cryptocurrency market and this market should be benchmark with Bitcoin.