It seems that the Russian authorities nevertheless took the path of legalizing cryptocurrencies in Russia, despite all the differences. The new version of the draft law “On Digital Financial Assets” allows cryptocurrency exchanges to work with digital currencies, but uncertainty remains. 

With a new version of the bill, prepared in October, familiarized with RBC. According to recent amendments, cryptocurrency exchanges will be able to provide the opportunity to trade in digital financial assets (CFA), both Russian and foreign. 

In other words, exchanges will be able to legally trade not only digital assets issued in Russia, but also foreign ones. Such an approach may attract additional investment from abroad, which will positively affect the development of the cryptocurrency industry in the country. However, not all exchanges will be allowed to work with cryptocurrency. 

Any legal entity that is not registered in offshore zones will be able to register the exchange. The organizers need to have an authorized capital of 50 million rubles, which automatically eliminates small players. Only representatives of large business will be able to have such a “cash pillow”, because in addition to this money, a budget is also needed to create the exchange itself. This condition was introduced in case the exchange would have to reimburse its customers for losses, and this is a reasonable initiative. 

There is a negative point in the new version of the document. CFAs do not include traditional cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin. The official exchanges discussed above will not be allowed to add them to the listing. So what happens, Bitcoin, ether and other currencies will be banned? No. According to the document, there is no talk of a complete ban on the circulation of traditional cryptocurrencies. 

Official crypto exchanges will be very different from what we are used to seeing. Tokens related to real business, goods, etc. will be available on them for trading. Cryptocurrencies, in turn, are rather a means of payment, and in the document they are not recognized as legitimate. It turns out that in the country there will be a kind of industry split: on the one hand there will be legal platforms with tokens, on the other - bitcoin and the like. The main question is only whether the state intentionally avoided the issue of banning the BTC in the bill, or is it a defect that will be corrected in the future.