Russia’s Billionaire Vladimir Potanin Sets Eyes On Digital Ruble

Russia’s billionaire and second richest man Vladimir Potanin sets his eyes on the digital ruble and not bitcoin because he thinks that a financial future can be found in a central bank digital currency as well as the tokenization of the real-world assets as we are reading further in today’s latest cryptocurrency news.

Russia’s Billionaire believes that digital tokens and a central bank digital currency will help the country go forward and made the current debate in the country regarding crypto regulation pointless. Vladimir Potanin who is worth $30.4 billion said that the advancement in the world of tokenization can squeeze unreliable products on the market. Russia is now at a deadlock about what to do with crypto regulation and the central bank of the country said that BTC mining and transactions have to be banned citing concerns about the amount of energy that these activities consume. The finance ministry however added that it will be necessary to allow these technologies and develop further so regulation is needed instead.

The president of Russia called for a compromise and said that Russia already has certain advantages when it comes to mining crypto because of the energy surplus in the country. Crypto mining in Russia is a huge business and the practice requires huge amounts of energy because the miners compete to solve complex mathematical problems and earn newly minted BTC while securing the network. The miners provide more than 10% of the computing power to the BTC network but the authorities talked about restricting the industry.

Potantin however who is close to Putin said that the real future in Russia is the tokenization of real-world assets and not decentralized currencies like ETH and BTC. Potanin said:

“Metal coins were replaced by paper money, and then transactions became cashless. Digital financial assets are just the next stage.”

He also said the Atomyze blockchain company is invested in tokenizing physical things such as metal as an example of how digital assets can become valuable. The tokenization of real-world assets puts things such as art and clothing on the blockchain to give people a sense of ownership. Potanin also added that a CBDC in this case can help the country advance because it is a digital version of fiat currency backed by a central bank but still different to BTC and ETH because they are centralized and tightly controlled.

Countries worldwide are in different stages of learning about technology. Some countries already even released a version of their national currency like the Bahamas. A number of nations already banned crypto-like Egypt, Morroco, and China.