St. Petersburg Exchange evaluates cryptocurrencies – Kommersant FM

The St. Petersburg Exchange is studying a new type of business – the platform can deal with cryptocurrencies, Anatoly Aksakov, head of the State Duma Committee on the Financial Market, told Kommersant FM. The exchange specialized in trading foreign securities, but in early November 2023 it was added to the list of US blocking sanctions, after which all trading in foreign assets was stopped. The platform reported that $3 billion that belonged to its clients was frozen. Will a new idea help save the company? Ivan Yakunin will tell you.

Deputy Aksakov explains that the plans are still far from being implemented. He only heard at one of the meetings with representatives of the St. Petersburg Exchange that they were considering digital assets as a new line of business. The parliamentarian could not confirm whether this means that the site will become a crypto exchange.

However, the company voiced such ideas back in 2017. Then the new direction did not appear due to the lack of legislative regulation. He is not there even now, but in a conversation with Kommersant FM, deputy Anatoly Aksakov promised that he would appear soon: “Everyone understands the need to resolve this issue, but the process has stalled. Right after the New Year holidays, we will immediately sit down to discuss what has already been developed and how to formalize it all so that it can be considered in the State Duma.

The Central Bank and the Ministry of Finance are not giving up on this, I have already discussed this with them. So I hope in the first quarter of next year that this bill will pass its first reading.”

However, Mr. Aksakov said the same thing earlier, promising that the law on cryptocurrencies would be adopted by the end of 2023. Now they are recognized as property, but they cannot be used for payment. Such transactions are available only for digital rubles, but the project is still in test mode.

With the new regulation, there are options: you can legalize only digital assets, then the St. Petersburg Exchange, at best, will be able to conduct some kind of international settlements; Or you can liberalize cryptocurrencies, and the platform will have more room for maneuver. But both options will not help return the exchange to its usual income, believes the former head of Binance in the CIS, Vladimir Smerkis:

“Now, as far as I know, history is moving forward with Belarus, where there is a High Technology Park. There, in general, it is possible to create a fiat channel for foreign economic activity from Russia. However, this is unlikely to become a replacement for the work that St. Petersburg Exchange carried out before, because the digital financial market is still small.

To what extent can the platform become a competitor to the classic type of crypto exchange? I highly doubt it. Until now, all the schemes that exist are near-gray.

Meanwhile, the biggest risks we have in the crypto industry are, of course, regulation, when external counterparties will find it difficult to move funds in favor of Russian companies or from Russian companies.”

This, however, is not the only idea of ​​the St. Petersburg Exchange. “Kommersant” wrotethat management was going to develop a derivatives market because futures and options on foreign stocks cannot be blocked. However, market participants accepted the idea with skepticism due to low demand for such instruments.

So far, only Russian shares are traded on the site, but this cannot continue for long, explained Dmitry Alexandrov, managing director of the investment company Ivolga Capital:

“There are no particular prospects for St. Petersburg Exchange to work with Russian assets. The Moscow Exchange has critically more liquidity and more trading participants.

In principle, it is not entirely clear how a platform can compete in this market, so here it is definitely necessary to observe how long it can survive without revenue. After all, in fact, she has been without it since the introduction of sanctions.”

The new general director of the St. Petersburg Exchange, Evgeny Serdyukov, in turn, stated that neither bankruptcy nor liquidation are included in the company’s plans. She expects to challenge the sanctions restrictions and return clients access to their assets. Without this, apparently, it will be difficult to open new directions, although the company has not yet officially announced any of them.

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