According to Russian Association of Cryptocurrency and Blockchain (RACIB), in 2018 the number of companies in Russia engaged in cryptocurrency mining has gone up by 15% and reached 75,000.
The data was presented by Yuri Pripachkin, RACIB President, at the first session of the Digital Economy Council of the Federation Council of the Russian Federation. At the moment, Russia holds 6% of the global digital mining market. The industry employs 350K nationals of the country in the aggregate. The number of the digital currencies’ holders has also grown and, according to Yuri Pripachkin, has reached some 3 mio against 2.5 mio a year earlier. Risks to the industry, RACIB President believes, lie in regulation uncertainties.
“Russia will remain dependent on other countries in the sphere of digital rights, since the rights processing infrastructure is now actively promoted abroad whereas Russia has not shaped its attitudes towards mining yet”, Yuri Pripachkin says.
Alexey Paikin, Managing Director of Minery, has his own assessment of the market situation and assumes that merely 10 to 20 companies out of 75K entities involved in digital mining in Russia, have some real capacities.
“Everything else is garage mining”, the expert claims.
Yet, in his view, the estimate of Russia’s share of the global market of 6% is quite realistic.
Earlier, Yuri Pripachkin told Invest Foresight that from the viewpoint of the current legislation, digital mining does not breach any regulations since it’s a mere mathematical computations process.
“By exchanging Bitcoin for Ethereum, you just give some mathematical codes to get others. But when you decide to sell the results of your mining and convert your Bitcoins into rubles or dollars, such a transaction is subjected to a taxation”, Yuri Pripachkin states.
As Anton Sobin, Crypto Technology’s co-founder and CEO, points out, at the moment the most rewarding idea is investing in mining equipment, since its cost is now declining due to many factors including depreciating cryptocurrencies value and emergence of new models in the market.