Speaking at St Petersburg Legal Forum, Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev shared his views on the rapidly growing eCommerce industry and the blockchain technology among other things.

He noted that these technologies are developing so rapidly that the current national legal system seems to be lagging behind.

“With the help of these technologies, autonomous from the government self-regulatory systems are formed, which start living by their own unwritten rules. For lawyers, it is a very interesting problem, often surpassing the boundaries of current law,” Medvedev said, as quoted by CoinFox. 

He added that blockchain technology and smart contracts facilitate deals to be executed automatically, without the need for intermediaries and interaction done through electronic devices.

Medvedev further said that the evolution of blockchain and distributed ledger technologies will necessitate lawyers to apply significant “creative” effort to adopt current legislation to the new practices.

“It is quite an unusual task for lawyers to find new efficient solutions, which can, in fact, become a basis for a new branch of law,” he added.

Russian authorities and officials have been quite vocal about the potential of blockchain technology. last year, Russian Finance Ministry was heard appreciating the potential relevance of blockchain technology for the development of e-commerce. In February, Internet advisor to Russian president Vladimir Putin German Klimenko said that blockchain technology is “amazingly interesting” and expects lots of experiments in this space.

Last month, it was reported that the Central Bank of Russia is considering giving banks the right to use blockchain technology to store information about all of their transactions. The 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.

Moreover, National Settlement Depository (NSD), Russia’s central securities depository, announced in April that it has successfully finished developing and testing an e-proxy voting system running on a distributed ledger (blockchain technology).