Russia-based Sberbank, the country’s biggest bank, has reportedly planned to roll out a DeFi platform in May 2023.
According to Sberbank’s product director of its blockchain laboratory, in March 2023, the bank will start open testing. News outlet Interfax reported that the Russian state-owned bank wishes to roll out a decentralized finance app. At the moment, the platform is at the stage of beta testing. Konstantin Klimenko, the product director mentioned above, stated that open testing will begin on the 1st of March 2023.
The DeFi project will be based on the Ethereum blockchain and will work in partnership with Metamask, the Web3 wallet. By the end of April, the team of developers behind Sberbank’s DeFi project wishes to make the platform widely available. Furthermore, Sberbank wishes to allow users to perform large commercial operations on its DeFi platform. Back in June, the company ran its first test with virtual asset transfers. In September 2022, the Russian bank stated that its project will also enable NFT minting.
Sberbank is the biggest bank in Russia, besides the country’s central bank, having USD 559 billion in AUM in 2021. Sberbank also leads the Russian card payments market with a majority of 61 per cent. In January of last year, the company rolled out the first ETF (exchange-traded fund) in Russia. According to the company, the executive members of Sberbank and its subsidiaries were blockchain fans since 2015.
