After the warnings emerging from the leading world economies and emerging contributors in the finance branch – The United States, Australia, China, France and even New Zealand. All of them issued comments that should be understand as a cautious acceptance of the existence of virtual currencies, but still a rejection to cooperate with the virtual environment. The next step was logically awaited from Russia, one of the determining markets located at the same time in Europe and Asia. The big population, wide territory and growing industry form an aim not less interesting than China.

The first comment from the country was voiced by the CEO of Sberbank Herman Gref. The bank can be considered as the biggest and leading bank, setting the trend for the rest financial institutions in the country. The conversation about crypto currencies and bitcoin as such was started last week in Moscow in a discussion with journalists. He believes that if the customers might voice a necessity for digital money and payment methods the bank should react and support the wish.

Gref also considers Yandex Money as the first step towards the development and acceptance of similar virtual and crypto currencies. The service of the Russian search engine is more similar to PayPal, very popular, is supported by Skype, but is limited to the citizens of the country. A wallet cannot be established by non-residents of Russian, which limits the use of the system.

All comments of Mr. Gref can be reduced up to four simple to understand statements:

  1. The Future belongs to virtual currencies;
  2. The currencies cannot be stopped;
  3. Greater regulation must be developed and implemented on the virtual currencies to stabilize the system and to gain more reliability for the users;
  4. The Sberbank might make the decision to make own virtual currency using Yandex Money as a basis.

The CEO of the Bank also believes that “…experiments must end in one or two crashes” to temper and harden the crypto or virtual currency for its own sake and better future on the market. Still he draws not many parallels between fiat and virtual prototypes, he does not consider the last as a full of value currency, but accepts it as a method of exchange to receive products and services.

Sbedbank also has experience cooperation with the bitcoin world before. The Bulgarian based bitcoin exchange service BTC-e is using for their operations the banks accounts and facilities. It can be stated that the biggest in Russia and Europe banks has been given the possibility to gain enough information of the new tendencies in the electronic finance environment. The idea to launch some kind of own electronic currency with digital wallets came after JP Morgan Chase was said to be building its own digital currency for use with electronic wallets last week.