“The first pilot group has been formed for testing the digital ruble,” the Russian Central bank reported today. “The group consists of 12 banks that have stated willingness to participate in the pilot project and submitted respective letters to the Bank of Russia,” including VTB, Alfa-Bank, Sberbank, Tinkoff, Promsvyazbank, and Gazprombank. According to TASS, “the digital ruble will be a full-fledged circulating medium equal to ordinary ruble and will be able to be widely-used by households, businesses and the state in the payment area, ensuring simplicity of payments, their high speed, low costs and high reliability.”
The Central Bank will issue the digital ruble, which is the same as the trials underway in China with digital currencies. This is a fundamental difference between scam digital currencies such as Bitcoin, which are a form of private currency not subject to sovereign national decision.