Russian President Vladimir Putin and his economic team have long been under the impression that, to wean the country off its oil dependence, they needed a major leap in some specific area of technology that wasn’t yet dominated by Western, Chinese or Japanese tech giants.
As reported by Bloomberg, Ethereum, the world’s largest cryptocurrency after Bitcoin, has caught the attention of Vladimir Putin as a potential tool to help Russia diversify its economy beyond oil and gas. At last week’s St. Petersburg Economic Forum, Putin talked to Vitalik Buterin, the founder of Ethereum, whose family emigrated from Russia to Canada when he was six.
The news agency has just published two stories on the Russian government’s past attempts to modernize the country by focusing on several technological fields, and the way virtual currencies are now increasingly regarded as a way to reach such goals.
