Everybody is launching CBDC and they are doing this in the phases. Europe seems to be taking longer to catch up on the wave. However Russia and other nations in the east side are making the innovation in this space lot faster. Meanwhile Russia is also in the process to release the CBDC for the consumers in 2025.
Despite the political and the financial issues, Russia seems to be going in regular pace for the development of the blockchain projects and their own CBDC named Digital Ruble. And they seem to have reached some of their milestones pretty effectively.
Let's take a look at the Russia's CBDC and how it is going to be launched and what are some of the features of it.
What is Digital Ruble? When it is going to be launched for consumers?
Digital Ruble is Russia's CBDC and it is going to be launched in 2025. It is not a replacement of cash. It is being treated equally to the cash. And both would get preference in the market equally. There is nothing that would hurt the cash infrastructure as per the consultation paper that is out. It also pushes for phase wise implementation of the Ruble on the blockchain. You can check it here.
Digital ruble is expected to be useful in the digital market and it would be used in the apps and the legal tender places for the ownership. You may also find that digital tokens and the securities would be traded with it as well. And there are chances that the forex market would be making use of the CBDCs in the market too.
Which we would see once all the CBDCs arrive in the marketplace.
Scaling of Digital Ruble and Pilot program of Digital Ruble
As the digital ruble is likely to be released in the phases, you may find that scaling the CBDC would be taking 5 or more years. And it would also happen in phases of adoption. So instant adoption and the results would not be possible either. To which the officials also agree on the scaling and the adoption part. You can read about their approach on the CBDC release here.
Coming back to the adoption part and the pilot. As the document I linked above you can see the consultation and the public pilot programs are likely to run on regular basis and it would also help get the digital ruble through tests that would make the scaling and the failure feedback easier. But overall I assume it would take longer time than anticipated.
CBDCs and the BRICS Internal Currency
Russia may also have to think of the adoption of the internal currency of BRICS. Because they wanted to get rid of the USD dependency, so they are creating the stablecoin that runs inside the BRICS nations and that was covered in my old blog posts few weeks back. Though the currency is yet to be released, I would be covering that once it is out.
BRICS stablecoin and digital ruble bridge would be another thing that would be required for the Russia to deal with. Because just by looking at the numbers I think the way BRICS is going to pull this off would be adding the CBDC bridge in between their coins. And that would even make them easier to bypass some of the sanctions. Its going to happen sooner or later.
Digital Ruble is coming in 2025 or later but adoption and scaling would take few more years before it can happen seriously. Let's see how Digital ruble works out in the digital legal tender market in Russia.