Russian CBDC is ready for its pilot phase

The national digital currency “Digital Ruble” of Russia is ready to go under the pilot phase in support with 13 Russian banks. 

Russia is now a Crypto & Blockchain adaptive country despite the crypto-hater stance of the Russian Central Bank, Bank of Russia. Since Q3 2021, the Russian Central Bank was planning to impose a blanket ban on the crypto sector but later the whole situation changed because of the Russia vs Ukraine conflict over their geopolitical drama.

On 17 Feb 2023, The Russian local news media TASS reported that the Russian Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC), or say digital ruble, is ready to go under the pilot phase in association with 13 leading local banks, in April 2023.

The CBDC pilot phase will allow the individual citizens to transfer digital rubles to each other in peer-2-peer (P2P) form. 

Olga Skorobogatova, the deputy governor at the Central Bank, reportedly said that the pilot phase will take place with real use cases but within a limited number of people. 

“The pilot will work on real operations for real people, but only for a limited number of them, with the 13 banks that have signaled they’re ready.”

CBDC project & delays

Initially, The Bank of Russia proposed its CBDC project in October 2020 and the Central Bank was planning to launch the pilot phase in 2021 but at that time majority of the banks raised issues with the CBDC pilot plan and noted that CBDC may reduce the Bank’s control from the money & also said that the majority of the banks were not ready to support CBDC because of lack of infrastructure.

Later the central bank shifted the pilot plan for 2023 and assured all the banks that CBDC use case framework will never interrupt the role of the traditional banking system & dominance.

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