According to June 15 Kommersant newspaper report, two of the largest banks in Russia are piloting cryptocurrency portfolios for their private clients and retail investors. The initiative that will be conducted under the watch if the Bank of Russia will involve the Alfa Bank and Sberbank, both of which will be offering the aforementioned private clients shares in a special fund that will be trading the six most popular digital currencies on some of the major cryptocurrency exchanges including Bitstamp and Kraken.
“We’d like to offer our clients an absolutely transparent way to invest in digital assets with a full compliance with regulations that will let them invest in the product they are interested in Russia,” Sberbank Private Banking deputy chair Ana Ivanchuk said.
Sberbank is the main state-owned bank, and thus, it is the Russian government’s primary employee paycheck processor. Alfa Bank, on the other hand, is the country’s largest private bank. Both plan to venture into cryptocurrency trading with the help of AddCapital investment fund, Group IB, and the National Settlement Depository. Add Capital is one of the entities that will be immensely helpful to the venture – the investment fund previously participated in the recent pre-sale of Telegram tokens and in this case, it will be in charge of the technical solutions for the banks’ project.
“Digital financial assets will sooner or later become a large part of the global economy and cannot be ignored. Our goal is to speed-up the recognition of the digital assets as legitimate financial assets as soon as possible,” the manager of Alfa Bank’s private banking branch, Anton Rakhmanov pointed out.
Among the six most popular cryptocurrencies that will be offered are Ethereum, bitcoin cash, Litecoin, and bitcoin. The remaining digital currencies will be confirmed at a later date. However, in a year or so, the combination of digital currencies will be revised and their proportions balanced by trading algorithms at least four times. These trading algorithms will be self-adapting depending on prevailing market situations.
According to AddCapital investment fund’s chief executive officer, Alexey Prokofyev, the investment process will allow investors to purchase a share of the fund. These shares are liquid and the clients can, therefore, send them for fiat currencies any time.
The custodian of this arrangement will be the National Settlement Depository, an entity which is part of the Moscow Exchange Group – the portfolio process will take about 45 days for testing but the specific dates for this are yet to be disclosed.
The degree of willingness that these two banks have shown is certainly bound to pilot cryptocurrency investments products to greater heights. We can now expect more and more institutional investors and financial institutions to venture into the cryptocurrency space.
