The Central Bank of Russia continues to reveal more details about its upcoming digital currency, and is currently considering charging fees for transactions in digital rubles.
Fees for Russia’s central bank digital currency (CBDC) transactions will be lower than those of electronic transfers. This was stated by the director of the financial technologies department of the Bank of Russia, Kirill Pronin, making his organization’s position clear.
According to Pronin, commissions for CBDC transactions will not be higher than those that have been decided to implement as part of the Russia’s Faster Payments System (FPS). This is a service that allows people to carry out instant interbank transfers, as they decided to tell local publications.
The FPS system was launched in 2019; and this makes Users can transfer up to $1,360 in exchange without commissions. For transfers that exceed this figure, the system charges a fee of 0.5% of the transfer amount, but with a limit, which is encrypted in 20 dollars for each transfer.
As previously reported, the Central Bank of Russia plans to launch of the first pilot tests with the purpose of launch the digital ruble at the beginning of next year 2022. The digital currency is planned to be a third form of money; and to do so it will have to compete with cash and non-cash. One of its great benefits will be being able to opt for a potential reduction in the cost of paid services.
In this sense, it must be taken into account that Russia is largely advanced towards the launch of its own central bank digital currency.
Cryptocurrency replacement
The governor of the Bank of Russia, Elvira Nabiullina believes that the adoption of CBDC should serve as a good option for Governments can replace private cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin for their own digital currencies, which are controlled by the government itself. There are those who claim that a responsible government should not promote the adoption of cryptocurrencies.
Nabiullina criticized cryptocurrencies for being anonymous and not backed by anyone: «We maintain an extremely negative stance on cryptocurrencies as private currencies that claim to be money. But since people need alternatives, we should work on this with the help of our projects. We should develop the digital ruble as I have already said.»
The Central Bank of Russia has continued to take a tough stance on cryptocurrencies, with several organizations and several government-linked ministries exploring the industry; and in this sense the Duma has decided to create a working group, with the aim of offering regulation of the growing market of the cryptocurrencies in Russia.
Despite Russia’s ban on crypto payments, the State Hermitage Museum of Russia has raised more than $400,000 in a non-fungible token auction on the Binance cryptocurrency exchange last September.
On the other hand, we must bear in mind that last October we saw how the Russian president Vladimir Putin said that private cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin «can act as a unit of account«, although he wanted to emphasize that «they are very unstable«. Furthermore, it does not rule out that at some point cryptocurrencies will become a «means of accumulation.»
In this way, the Russian president considers that it is still premature to use cryptocurrencies to settle energy resource transactions such as oil.
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