Bank of Russia Registers Nation’s First Digital Asset Management Company
Before the end of 2021, the deputy governor of the Bank of Russia, Vladimir Chistyukhin, declared its intention of allowing cryptocurrency investments with a catch. The investments will have to go through foreign firms.
Russia’s central bank has enlisted the tokenization service of Atomyze Russia, a blockchain platform, and registered the company as the country’s first digital asset management company. They made the official announcement last Thursday.
As per the announcement, the Bank of Russia has formally accepted the rules of Atomyze’s information system and the platform’s technical implementation as being compliant with Russian law.
By being registered, Atomyze can now provide its clients the chance to issue digital financial assets (DFA) through its platform and acquire “new types of assets in the tokenized form.” At the same time, the registration enables Atomyze to “independently carry out exchange operations within its platform” since DFA exchange rules have been “built into the information system rules.”
“In order to further develop the DFA, the Bank of Russia has formulated proposals for improving the regulation of such assets and their taxation, which will increase the attractiveness and applicability of digital financial instruments. In the near future, these proposals will be submitted for discussion in the form of a regulatory consultation report,” the central bank noted in the announcement.
As per its website, Atomyze describes itself as a blockchain firm based in Russia that is focused on “digitization of various assets and processes through distributed ledger technologies including, but not limited to DFA.”
Around the second half of 2021, Atomyze locked up funding from Interros, a Russian conglomerate and investment firm co-founded by Vladimir Potanin, a local billionaire entrepreneur. With a net worth of $28.8 billion, the tycoon is Russia’s second-richest person. Potanin took advantage of Russia’s privatization back in 1995 and struck it rich by acquiring a stake in Norilsk Nickel, a nickel and palladium mining and smelting company.
In a separate announcement by Interros, one of the first issuers on the Atomyze global platform was the Global Palladium Fund. The funding exclusively launched digital exchange-traded commodities financed by assets of Norilsk Nickel on six European stock exchanges, including those in Frankfurt and London.
“Atomyze became the first tokenization platform in Russia to receive a regulatory approval,” Interros wrote in the announcement. Atomyze’s ecosystem comprises tokenization platforms in Russia and other jurisdictions like the United States and Switzerland. The statement further says:
“This will ensure Russia’s ‘digital equality’ in the global digital economy, make it easier for Russian companies to enter world markets, and make it possible to attract more foreign capital to Russia.”
As reported in the past, the Bank of Russia has been a staunch opposer of local companies wanting to start offering digital currency-related services, including cryptocurrency investment. Tinkoff, a prominent local private bank, apparently acquired a foreign cryptocurrency-related firm in early January after the central bank purportedly prevented the firm from launching its suite of related services last year.