The two largest Russian banks will launch investment funds in cryptocurrencies

After Coinbase and Huobi, which will offer their ETFs to the biggest portfolios, two major Russian banks, among the leading ones in the country, will now offer investment funds in cryptocurrency (even if the term ETF is not clearly stipulated in our current sources).

Under the guidance of the Central Bank of Russia, Sberbank (Russian state-owned bank) and Alfa-Bank (private commercial bank) plan to test investment funds based on cryptocurrencies, according to a report by the Russian newspaper Kommersant.

The investment funds will consist of 6 cryptocurrencies among those being deemed "the most reliable" according to the report. For now and to our knowledge, 4 of these 6 cryptocurrencies have been revealed, namely: Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), Bitcoin Cash (BCH) and Litecoin (LTC). The remaining two cryptoactives have not yet been communicated by the two banks.

These two funds will be called Perceptron R and Perceptron RQ, and the minimum entry threshold will be $ 500,000 (!). In other words, these funds will not be used on all stock exchanges, and are clearly directed towards institutional investors, or at least towards very large investors.

According to CoinDesk, Anna Ivanchuk, Deputy Director of Private Banking at Sberbank, reportedly said:

"We want to offer our customers a completely transparent version of access to cryptoactives, which fully meets the regulatory requirements, and which will allow them to invest in an interesting product in Russia".

For his part, Anton Rakhmanov, director of the private bank Alfa Bank, reportedly said:

"Our goal is to accelerate as quickly as possible the recognition of cryptoactives as legitimate financial assets."

According to Alexei Prokofiev, CEO of AddCapital (one of the investment funds behind this project), the funds will be managed by algorithms (required by both banks), as they will self-adjust, weighting the 6 cryptoactives according to their valuation. He also specified that only regulated exchanges, citing Bitstamp and Kraken, would be used by the funds to make transactions on these different cryptos.

In any case, this seems a good sign that such funds, reserved for large portfolios and institutional investors are being put in place little by little, because they will allow cryptocurrencies to become investment opportunities like the others.