Russian Digital Financial Assets Proposed to Go Global via Vitalik Buterin's Ethereum — But Is It Worth It?

There is currently active discussion about the possibility of attracting foreign investment through Digital Financial Assets (DFAs).

In these discussions, the idea of "transferring" DFAs to the Ethereum blockchain — a project associated with one of its co-founders, Vitalik Buterin — and thus bringing them to the global market is being voiced with increasing frequency.

Let's take a closer look. Russia has various financial instruments for attracting capital from abroad. Government bonds (OFZs), for example. Six years ago, the share of non-residents in them reached almost 35%. According to the latest data from the Central Bank of Russia as of early February, it stands at 3.4% — a tenfold decline. Clearly, there is room for growth here even without DFAs.

As for DFAs, bringing them to the external market is certainly possible. However, I would emphasize the potential of using them as one of the instruments in Russia's export-import operations. The first such transactions already took place back in 2024.

Now the task is simply to scale this process.

And what about DFAs for attracting foreign investment?

First and foremost, we need to examine the technological side of things.

We must not confuse concepts. Blockchain is indeed a distributed ledger. But looking at Ethereum specifically, the largest share of nodes in this distributed ledger is located in the United States (38.16%). In second place is Germany (14.51%).

Nodes are not only about approving transactions — they also influence the acceptance or rejection of various code updates in Ethereum.

However, nodes are not the only thing to consider. The majority of queries to Ethereum (70-80%) go through two centralized providers located in the United States.

Furthermore, a significant portion of Ethereum's ecosystem infrastructure relies on cloud services hosted in the United States — with more than a third relying on a single organization.

By and large, it is already difficult to call such a blockchain a truly decentralized system or one free of risks: too much depends on what politicians and companies across the ocean may say, and indeed on the operability of the relevant cloud services and data centers.

And most importantly: why bring Russian DFAs specifically to Ethereum?

Why not develop our own blockchain solutions and offer them as a foundation for the development of financial ecosystems within the EAEU and BRICS+?

In my view, domestic blockchain solutions have potential. At Otkritie Broker, we worked on developing a corporate distributed ledger long before the pandemic began. We saw that other market participants also had their own developments.

Overall, the Russian financial industry has everything it needs to offer the world solutions that are in no way inferior to Ethereum — and on that basis, promote Russian DFAs to the external circuit.