New law bans crypto payments in Russia
Soon, crypto payments in Russia, whether through digital assets such as cryptocurrencies or NFTs, will become illegal.
A new bill promulgated by the President of Russia, Vladimir Putin, establishes a series of regulations on these cryptographic resources, keeping them enabled as investment instruments, but not as means of payment.
It will no longer be possible to buy with cryptocurrencies or NFTs in Russia
“It is prohibited to transfer or accept digital financial assets as consideration for goods transferred, works performed, services rendered, as well as in any other way that allows payment of goods (works, services) to be assumed for a digital financial asset, unless federal laws provide otherwise”.
The attached text, shared in a Protocol report, is a fragment of the new Russian law, which establishes the aforementioned prohibition. This text was presented to the state Duma in June by the head of the legislature’s Financial Markets Committee, Anatoly Aksakov, and the Russian president signed it into law on Friday.
The new rule will take effect within the next week, making crypto payments illegal ever since. Despite this scenario, the inhabitants of Russia could continue to mine crypto assets such as Bitcoin and use them as an investment instrument.
The new legal framework, in addition to the above, also requires cryptocurrency providers to reject transactions in which digital transfers can be associated with a sale.
This measure denotes a lack of interest in digital assets that Russia had already expressed in previous instances. Previously, despite the opposition of the Russian Ministry of Finance, whose head spoke in favor of allowing the development of these technologies, the Central Bank of that country requested a complete ban on cryptocurrencies, without being able to specify its requirement.
Previous observations agree that, due to the economic sanctions imposed by the West on Russia after invading Ukraine, Russian companies could find refuge in cryptocurrencies to avoid these financial obstacles, even though certain crypto wallets, such as Coinbase and Binance added to the sanctions, in accordance with US and European legislation.
Relegating cryptocurrencies to a secondary plane denotes that the Russian strategy points to the opposite, the strengthening of its local currency, the ruble, over these controversial digital resources.
