The Central Bank of Russia (CBR) is analyzing different techniques of restricting access to crypto for domestic investors, revealed the Russian edition of Forbes.
The founder of a crypto project that was tested in the regulator’s sandbox, Andrey Mikhaylishin, said that one of the choices on the table is blocking card payments to crypto platforms.
The monetary authority could force banks to stop transactions with some Merchant Category Codes (MCC), four-digit numbers assigned to the recipients of payments by looking at the services that they are offering. The code for digital asset exchanges is 6051.
Mikhaylishin revealed that the discovered the idea was discussed by the central bank from a bank employee and Forbes confirmed it was true via its own source.
The central bank has yet to offer any official statement regarding this.
Deputy Governor Olga Skorobogatova stated that the regulator isn’t creating a law for banning crypto but she did also mention that CBR is completely against crypto. It seems that the plan of Skorobogatova is to ban crypto investments.
Then again, the Deputy Director of Russia’s Federal Financial Monitoring Service, Herman Neglyad, suggested that crypto should be able to circulate in Russia but with strict controls over financial flows between crypto and the traditional system of finance.
Meanwhile, Deputy Finance Minister Alexey Moiseev said that purchasing crypto should be limited for non-qualified investors, saying it is too late to outright ban crypto since 10 million Russians are already crypto owners.