Russian President Vladimir Putin has ordered his government to devise a regulatory framework for cryptocurrencies.
The Kremlin published five instructions by President Putin on its website requiring the government to come up with legal definitions for cryptocurrencies, create a tax on mining them, and a legal procedure for initial coin offerings based on Russian IPO regulation by July next year.
"The Government of the Russian Federation, in conjunction with the Bank of Russia, shall ensure that changes are made to the legislation of the Russian Federation providing for...[the] determination of the status of digital technologies used in the financial sphere and their concepts (including such as "technology of distributed registries", "digital letters of credit", "digital mortgage", "crypto-currency", "token", "smart contract" ") based on the obligation of the ruble as the only legal tender in the Russian Federation," the directive says.
Putin also ordered that the government, under Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, develop a system for cryptocurrency miners to register and pay taxes on their income.
Russia’s central bank is to create a “sandbox” for cryptocurrency use until the framework is in place and develop a payment system for members of the Russia-led Eurasian Economic Union, which includes Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan.