Digital Ruble Front And Center In The Plans Of Russia’s Central Bank

Russia’s central bank recently introduced an in-depth roadmap for payments innovation in the nation for the three years to come, The Block reported.

The digital ruble is front and center in the Bank of Russia’s roadmap. While central bank staffers had previously unveiled some of the goals, the recent report shows significantly wider aims.

Moreover, the report showcased the fruitfulness of the “Faster Payments System” of the country. FPS, which rolled out in 2019, had its count and sum value of transactions increase by over two times from the third quarter to the fourth quarter of last year, garnering in excess of 67 million transactions valued at 459 billion rubles (approximately $6 billion).

In addition, the central bank is gearing up for open application programming interfaces (APIs) that will let the digital ruble connect with “any other private payment platform” in the words of The Block. First tests are set to happen next year.

The news comes as the digital ruble is moving closer to fruition as the Bank of Russia aims to build out a prototype by the close of this year.

The Bank of Russia would manage the potential central bank digital currency (CBDC), which would be constructed on a hybrid system combined with distributed ledger technology (DLT).

The bank will likely harness open-source code to build a unique digital currency, which will be made by December. The news came on the heels of the publication of a consultation paper regarding the implementation work and research that was run with stakeholders.

“The selected target model is a two-tier retail model which assumes that the Bank of Russia is both the issuer of digital rubles and the operator of the digital ruble platform,” the bank said in a previous announcement. “At the same time, financial institutions open electronic wallets for their clients and perform operations over these wallets on the digital ruble platform.”