Today, a bitcoin conference in Kiev gathered 26 speakers to open up a dialogue with the representatives of the national financial regulator, entrepreneurs, and investors. The National Bank of Ukraine confirmed that it will integrate bitcoin.

The NBU recently took a number of steps to facilitate bitcoin adoption. The regulator looked into bitcoin regulation, introduced regulatory changes to form the market framework for international online payment systems and invited PayPal to the country. In June, the Ukrainian equivalent of the BitLicense regulation project was presented during the National Bank Council Payments Commission session.

The discussion focused on bitcoin adoption and regulation in Ukraine. Participants included two representatives of the National Bank Ukraine, Sergei Shatskii and Natalia Lapko. They revealed that the state regulator was going to integrate bitcoin into the national financial system and was interested in the potential of the cryptocurrency and the blockchain.

“Ukraine will not ban bitcoin,” said Natalia Lapko, Director of the Payment Systems Department at the NBU.

“The National Bank will integrate the electronic money into the financial system of Ukraine,” she added.

Lapko also expressed concern that bitcoin might be compromised in the future.

National Bank of Ukraine is interested in bitcoin as means to replace cash transactions with cashless transactions, said Sergei Shatskii, director of the Retail Payments Department at the NBU.

“We watch bitcoin closely from this perspective,” he said.

Michael Chobanian, the president of Bitcoin Foundation Ukraine, noted that integrating with the National Bank framework would be quite straightforward while the interaction with the Tax Service could prove trickier.

“The key problem of bitcoin integration is not in the National bank, but in the Tax Service,” he said.

He noted that Ukraine is the second fastest country in the world after the USA in terms of bitcoin integration rate.

To ensure the data record integrity at the state level, Yuri Vlasenko, a trustee of the National Depository of Ukraine, suggested using the blockchain.

David Kiziria, an expert at the Development and Innovation Fund, compared the blockchain's transformative and influential potential to the Maidan, which saw the start of the national protests Ukraine in 2013 and let to the revolution in the country.

“Nobody wanted to introduce the lustration law but people forced them to. We have to do the same with bitcoin,” he said.

He stressed that no centralised currency matches the Ukrainian mentality.

“Ukrainians are anarchocapitalists,” he added.

Aliona Chapel