The figure froze on the test - Newspaper Kommersant No. 20 (7465) dated 02/03/2023

The figure froze on the test - Newspaper Kommersant No. 20 (7465) dated 02/03/2023



In the third year of the law "On Digital Financial Assets ...", the fourth organization, Alfa-Bank, received the right to issue digital financial assets. Until now, this market has not gone beyond testing, although the total volume of released products has exceeded 1 billion rubles. In addition, the secondary market has not fully earned, including due to the lack of CFA exchange operators.

On February 2, the Bank of Russia included Alfa-Bank in the register of information system operators (OIS), which became the fourth market participant that received the right to issue digital financial assets (DFA). This happened a year after the first company was included in the register (Atomize, see "Kommersant" dated October 4, 2022) and almost eleven months after the inclusion in the register of two other operators (Sberbank and Lighthouse, see "Kommersant" dated March 18, 2022).

According to Denis Dodon, the bank’s innovation director, “Alfa-Bank will become the first issuer on its platform and issue a cash demand,” and the first to be offered CFAs will be the clients of the bank and Alfa-Investments broker.

According to Kommersant's estimate based on OIS data, at the beginning of February, 21 CFA issues were registered with a potential volume of over 1.2 billion rubles. At the same time, more than half of the issues did not exceed 1 million rubles. The underlying assets are precious metals or monetary claims. The terms of circulation of the CFA are, as a rule, 1.5–3 months. Only the deadline for issuing "gold" CFAs of Sberbank is set at five years (until January 1, 2028).

Alfa-Bank also plans to place CFA on the rights of monetary claims and CFA tokenizing physical assets, including precious metals. In the second case, these are “hybrid assets”, “which digitize a physical asset and allow the investor to receive either a monetary claim tied to its price, or the physical asset itself, giving it liquidity,” explains Mr. Dodon.

Atomize and Lighthouse also plan to develop DFA based on cash claims. At the same time, Atomize is going to offer investors CFA for diamonds, as well as CFA per square meter of real estate, said Ekaterina Frolovicheva, CEO of the company. With regard to issuing CFA in the form of cash claims, the company has reached an agreement to securitize the bank's loan portfolio and the receivables portfolio of the factoring company. Lighthouse plans to hold "significant volume issues" in February in both rubles and Chinese yuan (one issue was last year, see "Kommersant" dated December 2, 2022).

As Kommersant was told at the Bank of Russia, several applications are currently under consideration for inclusion in the registers of OIP and CFA exchange operators. Masterchain expects to be included in the OIP register in the first quarter. At the same time, it retains agreements with future issuers of the CFA - VTB Factoring (previously bought one issue of the CFA), G-group (previously placed one issue of the CFA) and a number of others, said Ivan Operchuk, CEO of the company.

At the Moscow Exchange, among the pilot projects, they are considering the issue of CFA "for short rights of claim to large corporations."

However, interest in being included in the register of DFA exchange operators seems to be declining, especially since organizations that submitted applications two years ago have not yet been included. Lighthouse (a partner of Transmashholding) sees no economic sense in the role of an exchange operator for the development of the CFA market, says its CEO Denis Jordanidi. Thus, the company expects in the near future the Central Bank to agree on the possibility of conducting transactions through a nominal account, which will allow the issuer and investor to carry out instant automatic settlements on transactions. Alfa-Bank did not apply for inclusion in this register.

At the same time, experts point out that the process of formation of the CFA market is proceeding slowly. As Andrey Tugarin, Managing Partner of GMT Legal, points out, in the two years that the relevant law has been in force, only four organizations have been included in the register of operators, which are major players, “which can afford to enter a market that is not the most developed”. The activity of CFA issuance is minimal, transactions are isolated.

According to Dmitry Machikhin, CEO and founder of BitOK, “DFA is a complex, legally overloaded, illiquid way to digitize securities.” To create a full-fledged market, liquidity of assets and the appearance of investors are first of all necessary. Gradually, Mr. Tugarin believes, the market may go beyond the "artificial turnover of assets", but so far there are "no real prerequisites" for this.

Ksenia Kulikova



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