3 June 2017 12:01 am
REUTERS: The Russian Central Bank is piloting a number of digital currency schemes to understand which one is best suited to Russia, Olga Skorobogatova, the bank’s deputy chairwoman said yesterday, the TASS news agency reported.
“Regulators of all countries agree that it’s essential to develop a national digital currency, that it is the future,” Skorobogatova, who was speaking at an economic forum in St Petersburg, was cited as saying.
“Each country will decide on specific time frames for itself. Based on the pilot projects which we are conducting we will understand which system we could use in our case for our national currency.”
TASS said German Gref, CEO of Russia’s biggest bank Sberbank, had spoken at the same event of the need to legalize and regulate digital currencies as soon as possible.
Russian authorities have previously been skeptical about digital currency bitcoin, saying the virtual currency could be used for money laundering or financing terrorism and that treating it as a parallel currency is illegal.