A Deputy Director at the Russian Finance Ministry, Osman Kabaloev, has floated the idea of Russia launching a stablecoin to help with import and export payments. Over the last three years, Russia has tried numerous routes to circumvent sanctions given its access to Swift for cross border payments is blocked. A current popular route is the use of stablecoins, and Tether in particular. However, in early March, Tether froze $28.5 million in funds belonging to sanctioned Russian crypto exchange Garantex, causing it to suspend services.
“That blocking that recently happened… makes us think that we need to look at creating internal instruments like USDT, possibly tied to other currencies, like they do in the Emirates – a stablecoin for the dirham – and in many other countries,” Kabaloev said at a conference of the Association of Russian Banks, according to Reuters. He was referring to the recent launch of the AE Coin, a dirham stablecoin authorized by the Central Bank of the UAE. Notably, the dirham is pegged to the dollar.
This isn’t the first report about Russian stablecoins. Last August there were reports of plans to issue a stablecoin in the Chinese yuan as well as a BRICS basket. It’s unclear whether China’s government would support a yuan stablecoin or would prefer the use of its CBDC.
The yuan is relevant because a significant proportion of Russia’s cross border payments have now shifted to the Chinese currency.
Tokenization & crypto for cross border payments
Russia already has two experimental programs that can be used for cross border payments. It has digital financial asset (DFA) issuance, its regulated tokenization regime that was launched before the Ukraine invasion. This supports assets such as tokenized gold or oil, and Iran said it was working with Russia on using tokenized assets for payments.
DFAs were originally intended for domestic investments, but a year ago Russia passed a law allowing DFAs to be used for cross border payments. Around the same time, local ratings agency ACRA highlighted frictions for foreign DFA holders because they’d have to onboard with Russian banks.
Russia’s central bank is not a big fan of cryptocurrencies, and initially resisted their use for cross border payments. However, late last year a new experimental program was launched to support the use of cryptocurrencies for imports and exports.
Mr Kabaloev also mentioned proposals the Central Bank submitted for crypto trading.
On the payments front he said, “Pilot transactions were conducted at the end of December, and now the mechanism is gaining momentum. Therefore, we hope that we will only strengthen and expand this area.”
At the same time Russia is working on a digital ruble central bank digital currency (CBDC), and there’s been much talk of a BRICS Bridge. That’s a planned cross border CBDC payment system for local currency payments amongst the ten BRICS member states.
