The Bank of Russia Says Its ICO Experiment Was a Success

The Bank of Russia has successfully conducted an experiment on token issuance, an official said Monday during the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok, Russia, news agency TASS reported Tuesday.

Ivan Semagin, deputy director of the financial development department of the bank, told attendees of the forum that the regulator had tested conducting "an experimental ICO based on the existing infrastructure" in the Bank of Russia's sandbox. Though the experiment was a success, there are still some issues, he said.

"In the framework of the 'sandbox' ... technically everything went well, but there were a lot of issues from a legal point of view," he explained.

He did not explain what these legal concerns were.

The test was originally announced in May, when Russia's largest state-funded retail bank, Sberbank, together with Russia's National Settlement Depository (NSD), said they were working on a test ICO. The experiment was expected to involve a company named Level One as an ICO issuer, Sberbank as the "issuance coordinator and anchor investor" and the NSD as the custodian, recording and settling transactions, as well as safeguarding the assets.

At the time, Sberbank senior vice president Igor Bulantsev said in a statement that "many Sberbank clients are interested in this type of investment, and we plan to promote this service proactively once the appropriate legislative framework comes into effect; we will be one of the drivers to institutionalize and popularize this type of transaction."

Editor's note: Statements in this article have been translated from Russian.

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