With the special features manifested in digital currencies, they need to be regulated differently. This is the view that the RUIE has and is seeking to provide special status to cryptocurrencies.
The Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs (RUIE) has taken a step further towards the realization of this dream and has drafted new rules meant to “afford special legal status to cryptocurrencies,” as reported by Chepicap.
More than just giving special status to virtual currencies, the draft rules are likely to shift the whole view of how an Initial Coin Offering is viewed in Moscow. According to the RUIE, holding an Initial Coin Offering will not require a license for the issuance of tokens. Rather, the tokens will be viewed as a binding legal contract.
Apart from Russia, Ukrainian lawmakers are also concentrating on lawfully putting a demarcation point between cryptocurrencies and tokenized assets. This is followed by recognizing digital currencies as a store of value, an asset and a unit of exchange. These are captured under a new cryptocurrency bill.
Even as the RUIE advocates for special status, Moscow has some secret cryptocurrency exchanges which handle their business totally offline. Some of these exchanges are located at the heart of the capital and have daily trading volumes of close to 10M U.S dollars.
Here, transactions are “done pseudonymously, where clients come to the office bringing cash and documents proving its legality,” noted Chepicap. The client waits for around thirty minutes for the transaction to confirm on the blockchain. The deal is considered fulfilled when the client gets a confirmation that coins have been deposited on their wallet.
To allow for anonymity, the exchanges do not keep a record of the customer data. However, a thorough background check is done to avoid providing services to criminals.
Even as Moscow seeks to provide special status to cryptocurrencies, do you think it should be granted?
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