The Central Bank of Russia has added a new entity to its register of approved issuers of digital financial assets. The platform, known as ‘Masterchain,’ is now the fifth ‘information system operator’ in the country that can legally tokenize traditional assets and organize their trade.
Russia now has five licensed digital asset issuers registered with the Central Bank, including Distributed Registry Systems with its Masterchain platform, Atomyze, Lighthouse, Sberbank, and Alfa-Bank, the largest state-owned and private bank in the Russian Federation, respectively.
Distributed Registry Systems is an IT company that specializes in developing blockchain-based solutions for the financial, transport, logistics, and other industries. It was established in April 2021, with several large Russian banks, the Moscow Stock Exchange, and the Association “Fintech” among its founders.
Initially, Distributed Registry Systems plans to issue digital financial assets for monetary claims in the form of bonds that are not linked to specific assets or as structural instruments linked to various assets. The company will launch other types of DFAs on its platform in the future.
DFAs, which are digital assets that have an issuing entity, are regulated in Russia with the “On Digital Financial Assets” law, which came into effect in January 2021.
Russia is yet to regulate decentralized cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin. Despite Western sanctions imposed over the invasion of Ukraine, including financial restrictions, support has increased in Moscow for legalizing at least some crypto operations, such as cross-border payments.
