Digital rights and digital money: latest Russian bill on crypto market

Russian lawmakers are not willing to miss opportunities connected with the market of cryptocurrency, as one can conclude after looking through the latest bill on digital markets. It is mostly a set of amendments to the Civil Code. These redactions introduce two new legal terms: digital rights and digital money.

Digital rights, although they might easily be associated with copyrights, are in fact digital tokens. The Russian prominent media outlet also compares this phenomenon to securities. Digital rights can be verified by the digital code. What is most important here is that digital rights can be protected in court and will be a credible evidence. This reminds of how some American states have already declared that blockchain-verified data is reliable in courts.

Digital money is exactly what one may imagine: cryptocurrency. The authors of the document highlight the fact that digital money will not be an alternative payment tool in Russia and that this type of money can only be used as a medium of exchange in private blockchains, not without the state regulators overseeing the process.

Self-executable deals (widely known as smart contracts) are also described in the draft. According to the document, they will be recognized as regular deals.

“To execute deals with digital rights, a [new] rule is introduced: the fact of executed deal made by a computer program is not disputed”, tells the explanatory note.

This draft law might still be changed, as it has to go through parliamentary readings and signed by the President before implementation. The estimated date of implementation mentioned in the document (1 May 2018) will likely be delayed.

Current Russian laws neither forbid nor allow digital currencies, but the authorities have been seen vehemently reacting to Bitcoin ATMs. Anyway, the overall consensus present at least since autumn is that the new market should not be prohibited completely.

Image courtesy of RIA NOVOSTI