It is important that the law defines the following concepts for the first time: mining, mining pool and mining infrastructure operator.
Requirements for the activities of individuals and legal entities engaged in digital currency mining shall be established by the Government of the Russian Federation in agreement with the Central Bank. The government may prohibit digital currency mining in certain regions of the Russian Federation.
Legal entities and individual entrepreneurs are prohibited from combining digital currency mining with electric power transmission activities, operational dispatch control activities in the electric power industry, electric power production or purchase and sale activities.
Legal entities and individual entrepreneurs who will carry out mining activities, and operators of mining infrastructure will be included in a special register, which will be maintained by the Ministry of Digital Development.
Persons who mine digital currency will be required to provide information about the received currency and identification addresses to Rosfinmonitoring.
In addition, the law introduces a ban on advertising of digital currency, as well as goods (works, services) in order to organize the circulation of digital currency.
“Russia officially joins the race of cryptocurrency industry leaders. The law is a consensus, the result of the colossal work of a large interdepartmental team. We spent a lot of time convincing opponents of the need for regulation, and they read a textbook. “The path from denial to acceptance, let me remind you that we submitted the first version of the bill almost two years ago,” notes one of the authors of the law, deputy head of the State Duma Committee on Information Policy ROCIT Anton Gorelkin.
In his view, the trigger for the early adoption of the legislation in this session were two factors: the shortage of energy in certain regions due to the activities of black miners and the pressure of unfair sanctions: we need to diversify the tools to circumvent them.
“In addition, mining is an export point for high technology and at least 50 billion rubles in additional tax revenues,” Gorelkin believes.
The law signed by the president opens a new era for the industry, says Igor Runets, owner and CEO of BitRiver.
“Now industrial mining officially has the opportunity to build modern energy-intensive data centers, develop artificial intelligence and blockchain technologies using free electric energy. The volume of investments in the construction of data centers in Russia over the next 2-3 years may exceed 60% billion rubles,” he told RG.
Runets believes that the law leads “to an increase in the useful utilization of associated petroleum gas, which in turn will be used by power plants that power data centers for mining, i.e. by building such power plants in combination with data centers, the development of remote areas in Russian regions is stimulated.”
He added that Russian oil and gas companies are acquiring an effective tool to further monetize available energy resources and even reduce the negative impact on the environment. “In this way, up to 10 billion cubic meters of GAS can be used in the industrial mining industry – half of what is burned or dispersed into the atmosphere annually,” the expert concluded.
