According to a latest report from City News Agency “Moskva”, Russian Deputy Chairman of the State Duma Committee for Security and Anti-Corruption Andrey Lugovoy supports the establishment of a consortium for the development of Russian blockchain technology. 

"Creation of the consortium is welcome. If Russia will create a model similar to R3 (the international consortium created especially for the development of services based on technology blockchain), then maybe we can mobilize the technological, financial and organizational resources to make positive breakthrough in the area of ​​financial technologies ", Lugovoy told the news agency.

He added that an interdepartmental working group was established in the State Duma, which deals with trafficking cryptocurrency risk assessment. Lugovoy said that in the short term, the group will hold discussion of experts on creating its own model for legal regulation of this technology. 

"The model, of course, will only work under the condition that the main developers and startups that are combined into a single consortium," – Lugovoy added.

These remarks From Lugovoy follow recent comments from Deputy Chairman of the Bank of Russia Olga Skorobogatov who said that distributed technologies require coherence and understanding of each other and participants about how the one or the other system works.

Earlier this week, CoinDesk reported that Russian payments provider Qiwi also proposed the establishment of a domestic blockchain consortium, similar to the 44-member banking consortium R3CEV.

Also, it was reported last week that Russian developers have created several pilot projects using blockchain technology for biometric identification of users of banking services, which were discussed at a meeting of the "Internet + Finance" subgroup held this month in Moscow.

In addition, the Russian central bank announced in February that it has established a Working Group on the analysis of advanced technologies and innovations in the financial market, with focus on the study of distributed technologies such as blockchain, and other payment technologies.