Sberbank taking the global lead in Blockchain Finance

PJSC Sberbank is a Russian majority state-owned banking and financial services company headquartered in Moscow.

It was called Sberbank of Russia until 2015, currently, the name is Sber.

Sberbank has operations in several European nations, primarily post-Soviet countries.

By 2022, the bank accounted for about a third of all bank assets in Russia. 

As of 2014, it was the largest bank in Russia and Eastern Europe, and the third largest in Europe, ranked 60th in the world and first in central and Eastern Europe as per The Banker's Top 1000 World Banks ranking. Sberbank takes the 51st place of Forbes "Global 2000".

Due to the latest events and the special operation, Sberbank was sanctioned by most western countries and disconnected from the Swift system.

These developments didn’t affect the growth and the implementation of the long-term strategic planning of Sberbank, and in line with this vision, Sberbank announced that it is preparing to launch its Ethereum-compatible DeFi platform in April this year 2023.

Sberbank will then take the global lead in blockchain banking and at the same time, Sberbank will address the sanctions imposed by the West. With this move Sberbank, will be able to deal with the effects of these sanctions and mitigate their negative impact on the local and regional economy, while providing much better, secured, and efficient banking services to the trading transactions and the commercial entities worldwide.

This move reduces the monopoly of the USD denominated transactions and opens the door to multipolarity not only on the political front, but also the financial front, which is in line with Russia’s trade efforts of using national currencies, and the vision of ways to trade in each country’s sovereign coin and/or evolving Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDC).

Sberbank will issue its ERC20 token, which is the protocol standard for creating Ethereum-based tokens utilized and deployed in the Ethereum network.

ETH, “Ether,” or “Ethereum” is the native cryptocurrency of the Ethereum network and is used to facilitate transactions on the Ethereum blockchain.

Mr. K. Klimenko, the director of the blockchain lab at Sberbank stated that the goal is to make Russia’s DeFi ecosystem simply “NUMBER ONE”.

The platform will be compatible with Ethereum, users can use MetaMask wallets and Clients of the platform will be able to transfer crypto assets to it from other platforms easily and seamlessly.

The platform is currently under beta testing, open testing will start on March 1, 2023, while the ultimate objective is to make Sberbank fully open to commercial business at the end of April 2023 and align its operation with International Transactions again.

The success of this move will serve to effectively and practically open free access to crypto-finance worldwide and to properly address the geopolitical limitations and sanctions.