Over the past few months, Russia has moved to legalize and regulate cryptocurrency trading. Skorobogatova previously said an outright ban on bitcoin and currencies of its ilk would be infeasible. Unconfirmed reports from Russian news aggregators claimed on Friday that Herman Gref, the CEO of Russia’s Sberbank, will help develop a “Russian Bitcoin,” to serve as “the only cryptocurrency freely available [cryptocurrency] for sale and purchase.”

Earlier this year, Gref said at a conference Russia could have industrial-scale blockchain deployment by 2019. But according to Reuters, Russian authorities have historically been skeptical about bitcoin, associating it with money laundering and terrorism. Treating bitcoin as parallel currency is currently illegal in Russia. Only time will tell how regulators will treat competing cryptocurrencies as the new policies take shape.

Elvira Nabiullina, governor of the Russian Central Bank, said the Kremlin does not plan to make bitcoin itself a legal tender. "We don't consider that bitcoin can be considered as a virtual currency. It's more digital assets with the regulation of assets," she told CNBC.

Despite the uncertainties, many Russian bitcoin traders are celebrating. “Thousands of people are taking part of this [blockchain] movement, you see a conference in Moscow almost every week. You see Russian blockchain media with big traffic,” said Alexey Antonov from Moscow, a financial advisor at the Russian Supercomputer Organized by Network Mining. SONM plans to launch their initial coin offering in June and make blockchain technology without hash-based traditional cryptocurrency mining.

Financial markets megaregulator, Project Group №1