Chairman of the State Duma Committee for Economic Policy Sergey Zhigarev proposed the State Duma to legalize cryptocurrencies in order to attract foreign investments, including from countries that have imposed sanctions on Russia, Bitcoin.news reported.
“There will be a transformation of the whole banking and financial system,” he told other lawmakers, adding that the intermediaries “will disappear, and we need to be ready for this.”
Zhigarev explained at the meeting that, for the first time in history, the government’s monopoly on the production of money is under threat.
“This is an irreversible process that is difficult to control, only those cryptos that are backed up by some real assets have their prospects,” he asserted.
Zhigarev also pointed out that another challenge for the legalization of cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin (TIKER: BTC.EXANTE) is “the lack of an infrastructure for transferring cryptocurrency into [fiat] currency (rubles, dollars, euros, etc.) and back.” As an example, he said there are significantly more bitcoin ATMs (BTMs) in the US than in Russia.
The Bank of Russia is currently working with the finance ministry and the State Duma to establish the legal framework for cryptocurrencies. Meanwhile, the Ministry of Finance has published a draft bill for the regulation of cryptocurrency.