Digital ruble reaches 270,000 accounts, with no recent measure of their activity

Account openings on the rise

The Bank of Russia announced 270,000 accounts in digital rubles on October 23 via Elvira Nabioullina, Cointribune reports. About 15,000 concern legal entities and individual entrepreneurs. This is the total recorded, not 270,000 new accounts opened that day. The increase follows the national deployment in September. The number of accounts gives a first indicator of the service's diffusion, but does not directly measure the volume of payments made.

An opened account can be used regularly, only topped up, or remain inactive. To assess the adoption of a means of payment, one must also know the operations, the amounts transferred, and the frequency of use. These measures answer different questions. The availability of the service in banking applications also does not mean that all their clientele uses it. The digital ruble's monitoring must therefore distinguish its technical access, registrations, and its effective use in daily exchanges.

A central bank currency

The digital ruble belongs to the category of central bank digital currencies. It is issued by the Bank of Russia, which controls its platform, and adds to cash and bank deposits as a form of the ruble. Individuals access it through participating banks. This framework must not be described from the functioning of Ethereum: it does not imply that users pay gas or participate in an unauthorized public network.

The difference with a private stablecoin lies notably in the issuer and the framework of operation. A token aiming for monetary parity depends on the commitments of its issuer and its reserves; a central bank digital currency falls directly under the monetary authority. The comparison with bitcoin is still different, because it does not represent a claim repayable in rubles to an authority. Using the same word "digital" for these instruments does not make them economically equivalent.

Features still announced

The Bank of Russia plans a recurring payments service for late November. It must allow authorizing periodic settlements, for example within the framework of a subscription. Offline payment trials are envisaged in 2027. These steps must remain stated as projects. The announced calendar does not prove their current availability and does not allow describing technical modalities that have not been established. The authorization of a recurring payment and its execution also remain two distinct operations.

The deployment has an institutional dimension: concerned banks and merchants must gradually integrate the infrastructure, while opening remains optional for individuals. Remunerations have already been paid in digital rubles to voluntary employees of the Ministry of Finance, according to Cointribune's account. This targeted use illustrates a possibility of the framework, without representing all uses. The next step will be to measure how opened accounts translate into regular payments, beyond the mere number of registrations announced by the central bank.