Maria Gracheva, CEO of Russia's largest payments company Yandex.Money, believes that without an impetus from a regulator, Russia will hardly move fast towards blockchain adoption.

Speaking to Rambler News Service, Gracheva stated that blockchain cannot be implemented without a developed ecosystem, and, since agreements on Russia's payments market are hard to reach, blockchain is likely to get prompted only when the regulators decide to:

“Looking at how slowly all processes are being digitalised here, it might very well take us five years to get ready for [blockchain],” she said.

Still, Gracheva believes that once implemented, blockchain will be greatly beneficial for the organisations that register legal transactions, both governmental and private:

“For example, for any office you attend to get whatever certificate you need, it will be very convenient to have a distributed ledger which is accessible from anywhere, does not go offline and is reliable in terms of keeping the data safe.”

Earlier, behind the scenes of Finnopolis financial forum, Gracheva was quoted saying that many Russian companies would be interested in becoming third parties between electronic payments receivers and cryptocurrency owners. However, any such activity is considered unlikely without clear regulatory support.

In December 2015, speaking at the Feedback conference, the head of the Yandex technologies development department Grigory Bakunov called the emerging decentralisation the main trend of the upcoming year, with a special reference to blockchain.

Marina Guryeva, the deputy director of HSE Innovative Lab., in her interview to CoinFox also emphasised that the government should become the main driver of blockchain implementation in Russia.

Maria Rudina