Russia’s cryptocurrency sector has given up waiting for legal certainty and taken regulation into its own hands, following the decision of an industry body to establish an arbitration body.
Lawmakers in Russia are making progress on creating regulations to govern blockchain and digital assets-related activities in the country.
A Protestant church from the city of Irkutsk in Russia has been court-ordered to pay a fine of 1.1 million rubles ($16,600) after it was discovered to have been consuming large amounts of electricity for its cryptocurrency mining operations.
Russia-based cryptocurrency exchange YoBit has announced a scheduled pumping of coins selected at random.
Lawmakers in Russia now say that they hope to have a new framework for “digital financial assets” ready by fall and hope to receive approval by the end of the year.
Russia’s initial coin offering (ICO) pilot has ended and its administrator, the Bank of Russia, has announced that it was a complete success.
Russian police have seized no less than 22 automated teller machines (ATMs) selling cryptocurrency in several cities in Russia last week.
Rosfinmonitoring, a government agency responsible for monitoring and preventing financial crimes in Russia, is planning on expanding its internal systems to take cryptocurrencies into account.
The facility, built on the site of a former Soviet-fertilizer-producing laboratory, has an energy capacity of around 20mW and is equipped with more than 3,000 machines for crypto mining.
The number of cryptocurrency mining operators in the country has grown by as much as 15% since the beginning of 2018, according to the Russian Association of Cryptocurrencies and Blockchain.
Crypto miners and investors in Russia will now be regulated under the Internal Revenue Code, according to the chairman of the Russian State Duma Committee on Financial Markets.
State-owned Sberbank and Russia’s largest private bank, Alfa Bank, are testing cryptocurrency investment portfolios under the central bank’s ‘regulatory sandbox.’
