Tokens are growing in rubles – Newspaper Kommersant No. 198 (7399) of 10/25/2022

The market for digital financial assets (DFA) is gradually moving from small test issues to market placements of up to 100 million rubles. In terms of parameters, they are comparable to transactions on the classical factoring market. Market participants are going to expand the range of underlying assets for major issues, primarily through precious metals. However, experts point to the limited nature of the market, which, due to infrastructural difficulties, does not reach the secondary circulation of CFA.

Large placements have appeared in the segment of digital financial assets (DFA). Two issues for 50 million rubles. and 100 million rubles. at the end of last week were placed on the platform of the operator of the information system (IS) “Lighthouse”. In both cases, tokens were issued for the right to claim money. The issuer of the issue for 50 million rubles. became Soyuz Leasing, a thousand tokens were acquired by Soyuz Bank. CFA for 100 million rubles. NTS Gradient was placed and bought out by VTB Factoring. The maturity of each issue was about two months.

So far, the largest volume is accounted for by CFA issues secured by the rights of monetary claims, that is, an analogue of factoring operations. And the results are quite comparable with the factoring market. According to AFK Executive Director Dmitry Shevchenko, the range of interest rates for financing is now 9-17% per annum, depending on the type of client and the volume of attracted financing. The average portfolio turnover in the market is 65–70 days, with a minimum of 25 days (retail chains) and a maximum of 180 days (large transactions in industry and mining). At the same time, the volumes of the Russian factoring market are much larger. According to Mr. Shevchenko, in 2021, the top five market leaders paid 1.6-4.5 billion rubles. every working day.

At the same time, market participants are going to issue larger volumes of DFAs pegged to other assets in the near future. In particular, Lighthouse is going to carry out the tokenization of gold, as well as issue CFAs pegged to the foreign exchange rate. The volume of placements is planned for up to 1 billion rubles. Atomize is planning new issues of DFAs pegged to precious metals, “both for legal entities and for individuals.” Ekaterina Frolovicheva, General Director of the company, sees in this segment “prospects for large issues for large volumes.” Sberbank did not respond to Kommersant’s request.

Experts interviewed by Kommersant believe that, despite the large volume of new issues, it is still premature to talk about their market nature. At this stage, there is no public offer (transactions are concluded between predetermined participants) and there is no liquidity (the amounts of transactions are insignificant on the scale of the business of the companies concluding them), points out Igor Kirillov, head of the treasury of BC Ingosstrakh-Investments. Deals and issues are of a single nature, full-fledged trades can only be seen when liquidity appears, agrees Andrey Tugarin, managing partner of GMT Legal. BitOK founder Dmitry Machikhin believes that trading with the CFA with real market participants is “not expected” due to “an unnecessarily complex turnover and issue scheme.” According to Mr. Kirillov’s forecasts, it will take at least a year to build a full-fledged infrastructure.

However, the market participants themselves do not share the experts’ skepticism. Thus, according to Ms. Frolovicheva, active trading in the secondary market will arise when individuals join, and Atomize plans the first such issues before the end of the year. Lighthouse recently proposed an over-the-counter CFA trading model (see Kommersant dated October 13). The company said that the Central Bank (they did not respond to the request) positively assessed the initiative, and the model itself could be implemented before the end of November.

Ksenia Kulikova