State Duma committee recommends passing a bill on mining

The State Duma Committee on the Financial Market has recommended that the lower house of parliament adopt in the first reading a draft law introducing regulation of mining activities.

The draft law is scheduled to be considered on July 23 this year. Recall that the first version of the bill was submitted to Parliament in the fall of 2022, then it was reintroduced for consideration in April this year. The bill was developed by deputies from different factions, headed by the Chairman of the State Duma Committee on the financial market Anatoly Aksakov.

The bill, if adopted in its current form, contains many innovations concerning cryptocurrency mining. In particular, it stipulates that all requirements for the activities of individuals and legal entities engaged in the mining of digital currency, including participants in the mining pool, will be established by the Russian government in coordination with the Bank of Russia.

The Ministry of Digital Currency will be in charge of controlling the fulfillment of the requirements, and only Russian companies and individual entrepreneurs will be able to engage in mining. All of them will be included in a special register.

Companies and individual entrepreneurs who will be engaged in mining must provide all information about the receipt of cryptocurrency as a result of mining and about the identifier addresses.

Rosfinmonitoring, in turn, will maintain a list of identifying addresses in respect of which there is reason to believe that transactions have been carried out for the purpose of laundering proceeds or financing terrorism.

It should be noted that the draft law has been criticized by market participants who consider it to be too bureaucratic and discriminatory towards this type of business.