Payment service company Qiwi plans to set up Russia's R3CEV

Rage Comment : Although Russian regulators are concerned about digital currencies and hope to study legislation to ban their circulation, Alexei Arkhipov, chief technology officer of Qiwi, a Russian payment service provider, believes that the global blockchain trend has slowly changed the government's attitude, and the success of the R3CEV blockchain alliance has provided a good model for Russia's technological exploration. Therefore, Qiwi hopes to take this opportunity to copy the R3CEV model to promote the development of blockchain technology in Russia.

Translation: Annie_Xu

Russian payment service provider Qiwi has revealed that it hopes to establish its own blockchain alliance in Russia, following the example of the R3CEV blockchain alliance, which has 44 bank members.

Qiwi CTO Alexei Arkhipov introduced the company's blockchain-related work, repeatedly emphasizing that the company has independently developed a new payment processing process prototype. The project was originally called BitRuble, but local worried regulators were not optimistic and actively promoted the formal ban on the use of blockchain-based digital currencies.

However, Arkhipov said that people’s attitude towards the technology has changed, and Qiwi is also seeking to create an alliance similar to R3CEV; bringing together the strength of local banks, financial institutions and enterprises to further deepen the exploration of blockchain technology.

“We can see that the debate around blockchain technology in Russia is beginning to become constructive and substantive; establishing a technology consortium like R3 can help companies conduct investigations and test existing models.”

If successful, this attempt will serve as a mirror for related activities in this field around the world. For example, the Dubai government announced that it would form the Global Blockchain Council (GBC) with more than 30 members from technology companies, start-ups and government agencies.

R3’s efforts have perhaps been the most fruitful so far; it has brought together 44 financial institutions around the world in a series of pilot projects to successfully replicate commercial paper transactions and private blockchains using the Ethereum project’s blockchain technology.