ICOs

Russia’s Central Bank ICOs

from Trust Nodes 5 years ago 0 0 674

Russia’s Central Bank has carried out an Initial Coin Offering (ICO) within an experimental framework to test the new method of fundraising which the Vice President of the European Commission recently called a “viable form of alternative financing.”

Russia’s Central Bank concluded the test was successful. Technically everything went well, Ivan Semagin, the Deputy Director of the Financial Market Development, said at the Eastern Economic Forum (EEF) this Tuesday.

There were a number of legal aspects that need to be addressed, but according to a rough translation of local media, Semagin said:

“In the framework of the ‘sandbox’ of the Bank of Russia, an experiment was recently carried out to conduct ICO on the basis of the existing infrastructure, technically everything went well, but there were a lot of issues from a legal point of view.”

Semagin apparently suggested that ICOs can be a “useful technology” which can bring considerable funding to nation states.

With the pilot itself being within the context of changing what legal regulatory changes may be required to tap into the ICO phenomena.

While billions have been raised through Initial Coin Offerings that primarily run on ethereum, the only nation state to ICO is Venezuela which held a public sale of their oil backed token called Petro.

There were speculations Iran was to likewise issue a bond-like commodity token in an ICO, but they seemingly ended up with plans to create a centralized cryptocurrency running on a private blockchain.

Russia itself has been eying blockchain tech for now some time with a number of projects both public and private coming out from there.

Yet while Putin keeps stockpiling gold, there is no sign currently that Russia might itself bypass sanctions by tapping global markets directly through issuing tokenized debt.

For now, that is, because unless this is a gimmick of sorts, a central bank experimenting with ICOs sounds peculiar if they are not measuring the viability of it at a state level, either for themselves or for their allied nations.