Bank of Russia Counts 270,000 Digital Ruble Accounts in Seven Weeks

Russia's digital ruble has crossed 270,000 opened accounts seven weeks into its nationwide rollout, with demand running well ahead of what the Bank of Russia projected when the project left its pilot phase. Central bank governor Elvira Nabiullina gave the figure at a press conference following the monetary policy committee meeting on Friday, October 23, and acknowledged that the regulator's earlier forecasts had been conservative. “Public interest has far exceeded expectations,” she said. Of the 270,000 accounts, 15,000 were opened by legal entities, with the remainder held by sole proprietors. She singled out small and medium-sized businesses and individual entrepreneurs as the segment showing the strongest interest in what the digital ruble can do for them.

The state-issued currency is a central bank digital currency, the sovereign equivalent of a blockchain ledger with a single operator: the central bank itself. It went live nationwide on September 1 after more than three years in pilot. The first ten days alone produced 87,000 accounts, a count dated September 11 that has since roughly tripled. Nabiullina described the trajectory since launch as steep growth and said the central bank is consulting with banks and corporations on services to build on the platform. A recurring-payment subscription service is scheduled to launch in late November, which she expects to be in high demand, and offline payment trials together with business-facing services are planned for 2027. The state is also pushing usage from the top. The Finance Ministry has announced that its employees may take salaries in digital rubles, an option it stressed is available to every Russian citizen. Anatoly Aksakov, who chairs the State Duma's financial markets committee, added that the digital ruble network can connect to the fiat banking system to support direct cash withdrawals at ATMs, a step intended to broaden everyday use.

Sberbank Pushes Back

The 270,000 figure counts accounts, not users. Under the central bank's operating rules, an individual and a legal entity each hold one account, while a sole proprietor may open both a personal and a business account, so the count cannot be read as the size of the active paying base. The latest release also arrived without transaction data. When the 87,000 first-ten-day figure was published, the central bank reported more than 50,000 transactions and said many users were simply testing how the system worked; the 270,000 announcement carried no transaction count and no repeat-usage measure. The mechanics matter for how adoption can grow. Users open accounts on the central bank's platform through their own bank apps, in much the way a crypto wallet mediates holdings on other ledger rails. Participation is optional for individuals, person-to-person payments and transfers carry no fees, and an individual may move up to 300,000 rubles per month from an ordinary bank account into a digital ruble account. The design places state money on the same ledger logic that underpins tokenized real-world assets, though here the central bank is the sole controller.

Sberbank, Russia's largest lender, has taken a notably cooler view of the rollout. Taras Skvortsov, the bank's deputy chairman and chief financial officer, said visible public interest in the digital ruble is limited and raised a structural worry: balances parked on central bank accounts are difficult for commercial banks to put to work. The Bank of Russia's position is that the digital ruble is a cash-like means of payment and does not compete with bank deposits.

Our reading is that account openings are a weak proxy for adoption, and the absence of transaction data in the latest release says more than the headline count. The rollout sequence, free person-to-person rails now, subscriptions from late November, offline mode and business services in 2027, is engineered to convert opened accounts into recurring flows, and state salary payments provide an immediate source of those flows. The harder constraint is banking-sector economics: if digital ruble balances sit idle at the central bank, commercial lenders lose deposit funding they can lend against, which is precisely the objection Skvortsov raised. The late-November subscription launch, and whether it ships with usage figures attached, will show whether the second wave of adoption is real.