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Tim Alper
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Tim Alper
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The Russian banking giant T-Bank (formerly Tinkoff Bank) has announced it will launch a range of blockchain technology-powered token “investment” instruments.
The media outlet RBC reported that T-Bank has made its “entry into the digital financial assets market” with the new range.
The bank said its new “products” and “a fully fledged infrastructure for trading” the blockchain-powered tokens should “become available to retail investors as early as the start of 2025.”
Russian Banking Giant Enters Blockchain Sector
The bank will work on the project with Atomyze, a Moscow-based firm backed by the blockchain-keen Russian metals mining giant Norilsk Nickel.
The Russian Central Bank granted T-Bank permission to launch digital financial assets (DFAs) in March this year.
Other major banks have rushed to the DFAs space in recent months, including major T-Bank rivals Sberbank and Alfa-Bank.
T-Bank said its premium-level customers will be able to trade its DFA before the end of this year.
It will then follow up with a general rollout in early 2025. The bank has called its new range “smart assets,” explaining that they use blockchain technology and automated smart contracts.
This, the bank said, will allows it to “reduce costs and create fundamentally new products” that “are not currently available on the traditional finance market.”
Investors will also “have access to a full-fledged secondary market” with “market makers and constant liquidity,” T-Bank added.
What Are Russian DFAs?
In Russian legal parlance, digital financial assets (DFA) refers to tokenized versions of physical assets and traditional financial assets.
While they use blockchain technology, they are not real-world assets (RWA), as they do not use public blockchain networks.
Instead, issuers release and develop them on private blockchains, and are subject to Central Bank regulation.
T-Bank said its initial range includes “eight pilot instruments” with “a declared potential yield of up to 27.5% per year.”
They will be issued on the Atomyze platform. The US added Atomyze and fellow DFA issuer Lighthouse to its sanctions list in March this year.
The new T-Bank range includes the following:
- Loan products
- A smart factoring portfolio, tied to the “financial obligations” of small and medium-sized Russian businesses
- A smart floater, a bond with “a floating interest rate” that promises to be “always 2.5% higher than the key rate”
- Art tokens, which “give investors digital rights to income from the sale of paintings by contemporary artists”
- Scholarship tokens, used to “pay scholarships” to top university students
‘Hundreds of Thousands of Investors’
The Atomyze CEO Alexey Ilyasov said that the platform wanted to boost the size of the DFA market to “hundreds of thousands of investors” in the first half of next year.
T-Bank, the nation’s biggest neobank, was founded in 2006 by Oleg Tinkov, the founder of the Technoshock retail brand and other retail businesses.
Tinkov has been living in exile since speaking out against the outbreak of war in Ukraine in February 2022.
He has since renounced his Russian citizenship and Moscow this year labelled him a “foreign agent.”
In June this year, the bank announced it would change its name, in what its executives called a “logical step for both” its “employees and customers.”
The bank added that its 43 million customers “would not notice any difference,” adding that it was “business as usual” at the bank.
