With the Russian economy in the grips of an economic slowdown, the Kremlin has devised a silver bullet – in the shape of the digital ruble.
But there’s just one problem ahead of the coin’s September 1 rollout: Nobody wants to use it.
“I won’t be going anywhere near the digital ruble,” said Dima, a Moscow resident who asked DL News to withhold his surname. “What good could it possibly do me?”
Dima isn’t alone. Conspiracy theory-type videos about how the government plans to spy on citizens with the digital ruble have been circulating for years, even on Russia’s heavily censored social media platforms.
Russia’s conundrum comes as a warning to central banks all over the world that look to create blockchain-based versions of fiat currencies. The EU says a digital euro will help it unlock the potential of tokenised markets, while China has also unveiled ambitious plans to revamp its own digital yuan project.
But public support for central bank digital currency projects remains frighteningly low everywhere from Boston to Brussels.
Lack of appetite
A poll last year found that 51% of Russians are unwilling to adopt the digital ruble, with only just over a third saying they were even willing to “try” using it once.
Only 7% said they felt they’d been “well-informed” about the project by the central bank.
Bankers are just as vocal about their disdain for the CBDC launch.
“As an individual, I don’t understand why we need a digital ruble,” German Gref, the CEO of Sberbank, Russia’s biggest bank, said last year. “And as a bank [CEO], I don’t yet understand the need for this very well either.”
However, there are signs the banking sector may eventually come around to the Kremlin’s way of thinking.
“There’s zero enthusiasm for the digital ruble in the Russian banking world right now. Most agree with Mr Gref on this front,” an employee at a Russian bank told DL News on condition of anonymity. “But there’s more at play than just the domestic picture. If the CBDC somehow makes cross-border trading easier for Russian companies, we bankers will probably change our tune rather quickly.”
Adoption solutions
The central bank is acutely aware it faces an adoption problem. That’s why it has taken a tough stance on the matter.
While citizens will be free to choose whether or not they want to use the digital ruble, the same won’t be true for businesses.
The regulator has demanded that all major banks and retailers start offering their clients CBDC services starting September 1.
Medium-sized banks and stores will have an extra year to follow suit, with the rest ordered to comply by 2028.
Will this heavy-handed approach to CBDC adoption work? The jury is out, say experts.
“There’s a demand-side vacuum,” Yuriy Brisov, a legal expert and a partner at the consultancy Digital and Analogue Partners, told DL News. “Russia already has one of the most advanced cashless payment ecosystems in the world. The digital ruble solves no problem that Russian consumers actually experience.”
Fighting corruption
The Russian central bank aims to fix two major problems with the digital ruble. The first is corruption.
Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs statistics show the number of bribery-related crimes shot up by 25% year-on-year in 2025, reaching an all-time high. The ministry counted a total of 107,200 economic crimes last year, resulting in material damages worth almost $5 billion.
The digital ruble will provide Russia with “one of its most important tools in the fight against corruption and financial crime,” Anatoly Aksakov, head of the State Duma’s committee on the financial markets, told Russian newspaper Rossiyskaya Gazeta earlier this year.
The security and transparency of the digital ruble, combined with smart contract technology, will help cut bribable people out of the loop, Aksakov said.
The central bank is also looking to use the digital ruble to track budget spending.
“The state will know exactly where its budget funds are being spent,” Aksakov said.
Busting sanctions
The other major issue plaguing the Russian economy is economic sanctions.
After several years of positive growth, the Kremlin has recently admitted that Russia’s GDP in January 2026 decreased by 2.1% year-on-year, with the sanctions-ridden oil and gas sector’s revenues falling to their lowest levels since 2020.
The Kremlin and the central bank had to act fast after Washington severed Russian banks’ access to the interbank messaging platform SWIFT and froze state-linked dollar accounts.
Russia’s economic gurus have launched domestic analogues to SWIFT and a whole host of other global trading infrastructure. But all these advances still don’t do away with the need for the dollar. Or at least, not yet.
The ruble, the yuan, the rupee — experts say none of these currencies has a capitalisation high enough to function as a reserve currency.
The digital ruble, however, could bypass the need to use a reserve currency in the first place, by allowing Russia and its partners to effectively trade using their own currencies.
“Cross-border settlements to bypass SWIFT restrictions are the real use case [for the digital ruble],” Yuriy Brisov, a legal expert and a partner at the consultancy Digital and Analogue Partners, told DL News. “But the central bank cannot easily market a sanctions-circumvention tool as a consumer product.”
Using CBDC interoperability platforms, such as the China-led mBridge solution, could let Russian traders pay for goods using the digital ruble — and Chinese vendors could receive payments in digital yuan.
Firms have already used the mBridge platform to conduct over $55 billion worth of trade deals. Both China and India, Russia’s biggest trading partners, are fast-tracking their own CBDC projects, with a view to using them in cross-border trade. The same is true of Russia’s closest local allies, including Belarus and Kazakhstan.
But as grand as Moscow’s digital ruble plans are, they may still come to naught if the public remains opposed to using the new coin.
Tim Alper is a News Correspondent at DL News. Got a tip? Email him at tdalper@dlnews.com.
