The future law will give the government the ability to introduce key restrictions. Industry representatives look forward to dialogue
A new version of the bill on the legalization of cryptocurrency mining in Russia will be submitted to the State Duma. Deputy head of the State Duma Committee on Information Policy and one of the co-authors of the bill, Anton Gorelkin, announced this in his Telegram channel.
According to the deputy, the adoption of the bill will help formulate law enforcement practice, which will contribute to the further regulation of issues related to the issuance and circulation of digital currencies in Russia.
In accordance with the bill, only those Russian legal entities and individual entrepreneurs who will be included in the relevant register will be able to engage in mining. Individuals will be able to mine cryptocurrency without being included in the register, but will have to not exceed energy consumption limits set by the government.
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Miners will be required to provide Rosfinmonitoring with information about the cryptocurrencies obtained as a result of mining and data on identifier addresses (probably, we are talking about crypto wallet addresses).
According to Gorelkin, the bill does not provide for restrictions on the sale of mined cryptocurrency; its sale will be allowed “through both Russian and foreign infrastructure.”
Conflict of interest
A separate clause of the bill purports to give the government the right to introduce restrictions on mining in certain regions, and as an expert in the electric power industry told RBC-Crypto, this is a key clause that is the cornerstone for the industry.
The first version of the bill was negatively received by the Ministry of Energy. The department has developed a draft government resolution to prevent electricity shortages in certain regions. The ministry emphasized that a sharp increase in energy consumption could lead to negative consequences for other consumers, including industrial enterprises and social infrastructure facilities. According to the document, in energy-scarce regions, the connection of miners to networks may be limited, and services for them may be 5–10 times more expensive.
During a speech at the conference “Investing in the Future: Industrial Mining — a New Part of the Russian Economy” on April 25, the first deputy chairman of the State Duma Energy Committee, Valery Seleznev, noted that in order to receive the tariffs that industrial miners need, they need to establish a dialogue with regulators in order to thereby show that how their activities can be useful to the state.
Seleznev also noted the need for approval of the law and warned that with the introduction of mining into the legal framework, new players may enter the market and be able to displace or absorb existing ones. According to Gorelkin, restrictive measures will be “carefully discussed taking into account the risks for the development of the industry.”
“It is clear that some provisions of the bill are not optimal from the industry’s point of view. I hope to work constructively with the parliamentary corps during subsequent readings of the document in the State Duma,” Igor Runets, general director of one of the largest mining data center operators BitRiver, wrote in the Telegram channel, adding that his company welcomes the revised bill, which he called “a big step.” forward».
Mining in Russia
According to various estimates, Russia is already ahead of the United States in terms of growth rates in the mining sector; by the end of 2023, the country ranks second after the United States in terms of capacity allocated for industrial mining. In 2023, the capacity of industrial mining facilities in Russia amounted to approximately 1.5-1.7 GW. However, due to the lack of a definition of mining and a classifier of types of economic activities (OKVED), businesses are not able to fully legally mine digital currencies.
On April 22, State Duma deputies made amendments to the bill on the use of cryptocurrency in international payments, within the framework of which the Bank of Russia, from September 1, can begin to create an experimental platform for the use of cryptocurrencies in foreign economic activity.
In February, during the RBC-Crypto forum “Mining and Cryptocurrencies: Architecture of Growth,” Director of the Industrial Mining Association Sergei Bezdelov said that Russian industrial miners can provide pure cryptocurrency liquidity for foreign trade settlements in an amount equivalent to 240 billion rubles. But this is only possible if “weighted regulation” of the cryptocurrency mining sector is introduced in the country.