Russia’s central bank has revealed that they concluded a pilot run of an Initial Coin Offering in order to research the use of blockchain and cryptocurrency in settlement, inter-bank transfer efficiency, and as investment vehicles.

While speaking to Russian news agency TASS at the Eastern Economic Forum in Vlasivostok, Ivan Semagin, the deputy director of financial development at the Bank of Russia, said that the central bank has deemed their sandbox ICO experiment as successful, but that there are legal issues to consider.

Semagin said that:

“In the framework of Bank of Russia’s ‘sandbox', an experiment was recently carried out to conduct an ICO…technically everything went well, but there were a lot of issues from a legal point of view.”

The success of the central bank’s ICO pilot follows the long-reported partnership between the central bank, Russia’s largest retail bank, Sberbank, and the National Settlement Depository, who have been working to test the efficiency of crypto through a sandbox platform developed by the central bank.

A key factor of the sandbox environment is that experimentation was conducted without regard to the government’s strict regulations, which is why there were resulting legal hurdles despite the pilot test’s success. Semagin did not elaborate on what the exact legal issues are during the interview.

The process of the test began with the central bank, who was operating as the party issuing the tokens. The National Settlement Depository served as the custodian for the transaction, while Sberbank acted as the investor. According to Semagin’s statement, the overall process of issuing, selling, and transferring the tokens went smoothly.

Igor Bulantseve, the chief of Sberbank’s corporate and investing arm – called Sberbank CIB – spoke about the interest in ICOs among Russian investors, saying that:

“Sberbank CIB considers the Russian ICO market to be very promising. Many Sberbank clients are interested in this type of investment, and we plan to promote this service proactively once the appropriate legislative framework comes into effect; we will be one of the drivers to institutionalize and popularize this type of transaction.”