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‘I think it’s the future for our financial system because it correlates with this development of digital economy.’
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— Elvira Nabiullina, Russia’s central bank chief
Russia’s Nabiullina sees digital currencies as the future of Moscow’s payment infrastructure.
Speaking during an interview on CNBC, the head of Russia’s central bank said central bank digital currency, or CBDC, could fill the need for a fast, cheap payment system.
Nabiullina told the business network that one of the major challenges of creating a blockchain-backed ruble will be figuring out ways for global economies to interact, amid growing experimentation by sovereign government’s around the use of virtual assets as a means of payment.
She said that “it will be very difficult to create some interconnections between these systems to facilitate all cross-border payments.”
Russia’s interest in a digital ruble
RUBUSD,
0.66
comes after China became the first major economy to issue a blockchain-enabled, digital version of its currency, the yuan
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0.01.
The Federal Reserve has said that it is currently studying the idea of a digital dollar
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+0.07%,
but Fed Chairman Jerome Powell said the U.S. central bank won’t move without first winning the support of a large majority of the American public and Congress. In March, Powell said that “because we’re the world’s principle reserve currency, we don’t need to rush this project—we don’t need to be first to market.”
The popularity of cryptocurrencies, which operate on a permissionless, distributed-ledger network, like bitcoin
BTCUSD,
+4.92%
and Ether on the ethereum blockchain
ETHUSD,
+8.14%,
has helped to spark interest of governments in creating their own blockchain-backed currencies.
However CBDCs will operate as centralized platforms rather than decentralized protocols like the world’s No. 1 and 2 largest crypto.
