Cryptocurrency is gaining traction in Russia, the head of the country’s financial regulator has told President Putin. The agency, Rosfinmonitoring, has revealed that it is tracking thousands of participants in digital asset transactions with a new system for blockchain analytics.
Crypto Transactions in Russia Amount to Almost $13 Billion, Financial Watchdog Says
Yury Chikhanchin, Director of the Federal Financial Monitoring Service of the Russian Federation (Rosfinmonitoring), reported to President Vladimir Putin about the agency’s present operations.
The executive noted that the watchdog is keeping an eye on crypto transaction activities by more than 25,000 participants at a meeting with him. The Service has also identified roughly a dozen financial institutions which could provide support.
Quoted by RBC, a business news portal, Putin remarked that money and new financial instruments are everywhere. “Swindlers” can also be found. Chikhanchin accepted that cryptocurrency usage is increasing in Russia in the absence of comprehensive regulation.
“We estimate that the cryptocurrency turnover today is more than 630,000 bitcoins,” he stated without further details. At current rates, that amount of BTC is worth $13 billion in fiat currency. According to a forecast provided by Bank of Russia in 2021, the annual volume of crypto transactions by Russians was estimated to be around $5 billion.
Rosfinmonitoring has started more than 60 criminal cases and conducted around 120 crypto-related investigations. Chikhanchin declared that this was made possible thanks to the launch of Russia’s new ‘Transparent Blockchain’ platform.
“A year ago, the service could only track bitcoin, but this system permits us to observe the movements of more than 20 different crypto assets,” the official explained. The crypto analytics tool is currently being tested by the Ministry of Internal Affairs?, Federal Security Service, and Investigative Committee. Other countries from the Commonwealth of Independent States are also interested in it.
Transparent Blockchain was used to take down the darknet marketplace Hydra as part of cooperation between law enforcement agencies and representatives from financial intelligence organisations of other countries.
The website was shut down in early April 2022, when German authorities seized it with U.S. help. A Russian citizen, Dmitry Pavlov, allegedly the site’s administrator, was arrested later in the month.
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