Russian State Duma plans to adopt the laws on crowdfunding and cryptocurrencies in September 2018

Russian State Duma decided to postpone the adoption of cryptocurrency and crowdfunding regulation till September 2018, as reported by the Head of the State Duma’s Committee for Financial Market Anatoly Aksakov.

“We will not be able to cope with it during the spring session. The technology is rather a complicated one. It is rather transboundary in its nature and thus we’d rather not spell out norms and regulations that would not work, given all the specificity of this technology. We have agreed that these documents will be definitely ready by early fall. We hope to adopt them in the second and the third reading in September,” – he said.

According to Aksakov, the parliamentarians have already come to the consensus about the general approach to the matter.

“The most important thing is the legalization of this market, then comes the establishment of the key concepts, next are the rights and duties of investors and token issuers, and the power to grant or deny the right to use crypto tools on the Russian market on the part of the Bank of Russia is the last to go,” – the official explained.

According to Aksakov, it turned out to be a much more complicated task than initially foreseen to conceptualize all these approaches. Moreover, some amendments to the Civil Code are to be introduced in order the basic procedure for the emerging cryptocurrency market operation to be established. The official believes that these amendments should be brought together with the laws on cryptocurrencies and crowdfunding.

“All this is something new for us. All this requires deep immersion into the peculiarities and essence of this new technology and related tools. Thus, it took us quite a while to draft legally sound documents on the matter,” – the parliamentarian concluded.

The legal status of cryptocurrencies, ICOs, cryptocurrency mining and crowdfunding is still far from being clarified in Russia. The end of May saw the draft law “On digital financial assets” passing its first reading in the State Duma. Though this document defines such core notions as “smart contracts” and “mining”, there is still much uncertainty about other concepts and definitions related to the world of crypto. For instance, Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev noted that the draft law on cryptocurrencies will likely establish the notions of “digital money” and “digital rights” instead of “cryptocurrency” and “token”.
https://en.bitnovosti.com/2018/07/17/russian-state-duma-plans-to-adopt-the-laws-on-crowdfunding-and-cryptocurrencies-in-september-2018/