A top official of the Russian Ministry of Finance has revealed that plans are ongoing to regulate cryptocurrencies in the country based on three categories.
According to an RNS Online report today, Alexei Moiseev, the deputy minister of Finance stated the categories as Technical Tokens, Virtual Assets, and Digital Financial Assets.
Although Russia does not consider cryptocurrencies as a legal tender, Moiseev still believes there is a need to regulate cryptos into one of these categories.
Moiseev said that the proposed classification of cryptocurrencies into categories is similar to what is in existence in other nations.
He explained that cryptocurrencies like Ether (ETH) would fall under the technical tokens category because it has the potential to allow for the smooth functionality of a network.
For the Virtual Asset category, cryptocurrencies that are mostly used to transact values will be included, with Bitcoin (BTC) considered as a perfect example to fit in this category.
While digital currencies that would fall under the last category – Digital Financial Asset category would include various tokens that are sold during Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs).
It is conditionally possible to divide cryptocurrencies into three types: technical tokens that occur to maintain the functioning of the system, virtual assets, that is, bitcoins, and a digital financial asset – this is, relatively speaking, ICO, Moiseev said.
There is a tendency that the proposed legal classification for cryptocurrencies might be included in the bill requested by Russian Prime Minister, Dmitry Medvedev prompting the Ministry of Finance and the State Duma to draw and adopt a bill for the country’s crypto industry on November 1.
As reported in May, the Central Bank of Russia is eyeing the possibility of adopting a law on digital assets before the end of State Duma’s 2019 spring session.
Even though Russia does not consider cryptocurrencies as a legal tender because they believe it would compete with the Rubble, and the country had previously weighed the possibility of investing in Bitcoin as an alternative to the U.S dollars, which they have been barred from using through a sanction.
