Russia, that is in the process of drafting and finalizing its crypto rules, is expanding its experiments with the asset class. In a fresh development, Russia’s Sberbank has issued its first corporate loan against Bitcoin as collateral. Headquartered in Moscow, Russia — the state-owned lender is the oldest bank of the country that was established in 1841.
In an official statement released over the weekend, Sberbank said that the loan has been issued to Intelion Data JSC — which is a BTC mining company.
“This pilot deal allowed us to test mechanisms for working with digital security, which could form the basis for future regulation,” said Anatoly Popov, Deputy Chairman of the Management Board of Sberbank as commenting on the development.
Without providing details on the amount of loan released, Sberbank did say that Intelion mined the BTC tokens that have been accepted as the collateral for the loan.
To store the BTC tokens, the Russian bank has picked its own crypto storage Rutoken.
“We believe this product will be relevant not only for cryptocurrency miners but also for companies that own crypto assets,” Sberbank noted.
The lender acknowledged that the state of crypto regulations is pretty must at infancy in Russia. Sberbank said that having assessed the outcome of this pilot, it plans to work with the Central Bank to explore similar crypto-involving services.
This year, the acceptance of crypto as loan collaterals emerged as a topic of discussion in multiple nations. U.S. Senator Cynthia Lummins, for instance, proposed in July that digital assets should be included as a part of the mortgage risk assessments parameters for single-family home loans.
Later in October, crypto firm Block Earner also debuted the first BTC-backed mortgage programme in Australia.