Russia Seeks to Become Crypto Capital With Moscow Stock Exchange Welcoming Crypto-Currency Trade

The Moscow Stock Exchange will soon become the first stock exchange to make crypto-currency a new investable asset. You must be a qualified investor to make crypto currency trades on the exchange.

Russia's Deputy Minister of Finance, Alexei Moiseyev, told Rossiya 24 on Tuesday that the RTS Micex was only allowing for qualified investors to trade in crypto-currency in order to avoid large money laundering operations. Qualified investors in Russia need to have at least six million rubles in personal assets or 200 million rubles for investment firms.

"Recognizing the extraordinary popularity of crypto-currencies among Russian users, some of the Russian regulators are lobbying a permissive rather than a prohibitive approach to the new technology," says Anar Babaev, co-founder of ICOBox in Moscow. "They are cautiously moving towards adopting new laws to embrace blockchain and make it a national priority," he says. ICOBox helps companies standardize the ICO process, which is the IPO of the crypto-currency and the blockchain developers new virtual world.

Russians are some of the most savvy crypto-currency developers worldwide. Vitalik Buterin, a Russian born programmer who was educated at the University of Waterloo, BlackBerry's home turf, created Ethereum, a two-year old block chain-based computing platform that has its own digital currency called ether. That and bitcoin are the two biggest digital currencies in Russia.

Buterin met with Vladimir Putin on June 2 to discuss the future of this market. On Tuesday, Buterin said that it was now clear to him that "many people at different levels of the Russian government are open to crypto-currencies. I think my meeting with Putin helped him see things clearer," Buterin was quoted as saying in Tatarstan's online daily Realnoe Vremya.