Moscow Exchange Prepares to List Digital Financial Assets by Year End

Russia’s largest market for equities, bonds, and derivatives, the Moscow Exchange, intends to launch a product based on digital financial assets by the end of the year, an executive has revealed. The trading platform is already working with a partner to organize the placement of digital tokens.

Russia’s Top Exchange to Facilitate Trading of Financial Instruments Based on Digital Assets

Releasing a product based on digital financial assets (DFAs) is in the plans for 2022, a high-ranking representative of the Moscow Exchange (MOEX) has indicated in a recent interview. The announcement comes after a turbulent period for Russia’s leading stock market when it had to deal with market volatility, sanctions pressure, and cyberattacks earlier this year.

Alongside ‘digital rights,’ DFAs is currently the main legal term in Russian law that applies to various digital assets, including cryptocurrencies according to some statements by Russian officials, but primarily those that have a specific issuer.

MOEX is now working with one of its partners to realize a project to place digital tokens, Managing Director for Information Technology and Member of the Board of the Moscow Exchange Andrey Burilov told the Tass news agency. He noted this is a company from the real economy and elaborated:

The main point here is to link the company’s fixed assets with the investment market using digital technologies.

Digitizing commodities creates added value for market participants, Burilov emphasized. MOEX aims to utilize DFAs in order to offer its customers another investment tool which offers a fundamentally new way to ensure information security.

Burilov also remarked that the main difficulty in terms of implementation is that this is a completely new product for the market, from regulation to software. Another challenge is its integration into the existing systems of the exchange and its clients, he pointed out.

In early July, the head of the Financial Market Committee at the lower house of parliament stated that a Russian digital asset exchange would be in the best position to process crypto transactions in the country. Anatoly Aksakov also suggested that the crypto trading platform may be established at the Moscow Exchange.

Do you think MOEX will fulfill its plan to start trading digital financial assets by the end of the year? Tell us in the comments section below.

Lubomir Tassev

Lubomir Tassev is a journalist from tech-savvy Eastern Europe who likes Hitchens’s quote: “Being a writer is what I am, rather than what I do.” Besides crypto, blockchain and fintech, international politics and economics are two other sources of inspiration.

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