The biggest Russian search engine Yandex, which acts as a local counterpart to Google within the CIS, and successfully outruns the worldwide giant across much of the former USSR, is interested in integration of bitcoin into its own payment system Yandex.Money in order to allow merchants deal with cryptocurrencies. This was announced at FinTech forum in the city of Kazan.
In particular, Maria Gracheva, CEO of Yandex.Money announced the company is analyzing the options of supporting bitcoin payments.
Nora Kirkizh, PR manager at Yandex.Money, stated that bitcoin perfectly fits payment solutions as offered by the service.
“The technology underlying cryptocurrencies may be applied to a multitude of diverse products. For instance, Yandex.Money offers processing solutions for online stores. By using those solutions merchants may get their money from the customers via credit cards, web wallets, online banking, and other payment tools. Currently there are over 76,000 online stores using Yandex’s payment tools to process their transactions,” she said in an interview
However, according to the company’s spokesperson, insofar as cryptocurrencies are not regulated in Russia whatsoever, Yandex cannot proceed with using them:
“Cryptocurrencies have their pros and cons. It’s a pretty inexpensive technology which may be easily integrated anywhere, and as soon as bitcoin enters the legal environment, any payment processor would integrate the technology right away.”
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