Russia will use the digital ruble for international settlements amid the ongoing sanctions imposed by the West, with plans to introduce a CBDC by next year so let’s read more in today’s latest cryptocurrency news.

Russia’s central bank said that it is looking to start a pilot for the digital ruble next year with more plans to use a central bank digital currency for international payments. As per the reports, the governor of the Bank of Russia Elvira Nabiulina spoke to the Lower house of Parliament and noted that the central bank prepares to start a real-world digital ruble transaction by 2023:

“The digital rouble is among the priority projects. We have fairly quickly created a prototype … now we are holding tests with banks and next year we will gradually have pilot transactions.”

Russia was working on developing a CBDC for a year now and the central bank launched a prototype of the digital ruble platform in 2021 with about 12 commercial banks signaling the interest in taking part in the pilot program. Russia will use the digital ruble for international payments as three out of the 12 banks connected to the platform compel the digital ruble transfers between clients via mobile banking apps. Apart from the digital ruble project, Nabiulina said that Russia is expanding the number of countries that accept the organization’s MIR Banking cards and MIR is a local payment system to Visa and Mastercard after both companies had suspended the operations in Russia after the Ukraine invasion.

The ruble’s value dropped after certain Russian banks were cut off from the financial messaging giant SWIFT. In the meantime, the latest development came as Russia is being slammed with different economic sanctions, and in the early days of the invasion of Ukraine, there were calls for crypto exchanges to stop servicing the Russian users but a few refused at first. The United States kept an eye on Russia to see if the country will use crypto to avoid financial sanctions. The US Deputy Secretary of Treasury and the President of the EU Central Bank Christine Lagarde warned exchanges against aiding Russia to avoid the sanctions.

Binance announced that it will limit services in Russia because of the new EU sanctions. According to the crypto exchange giant, the platform will service Russian nationals or neutral persons residing in Russia or other legal entities that are established in Russia which have crypto asset holdings exceeding the value of 10,000 EUR.