Page 12 - RusRPTJun20
P. 12
The rest of the money will go toward covering regional budget deficits (5% of total), victims of the fight against coronavirus, and direct subsidies and affordable loans for major companies, for example airlines (4%).
Russia’s total anti-crisis spending of $1113bn, or circa 8% GDP as of May 28 is is now closer to what is being spent in Europe (on average 10% of GDP) or the US (14%).
Still, President Vladimir Putin and the government prefer caution because of a traumatic experience in the 2008 financial crisis when Russia burned through almost all its reserves. They likely also want to save the money for a populist spending spree ahead of the 2024 presidential election.
2.3 Russian Internet guru Pavel Durov cancels his $1.7bn TON blockchain project
Internet guru and owner of the Telegram message service has halted his TON block chain project and will have to return the $1.7bn he raised in the largest ever ICO to fund the project.
“Today is a sad day for us here at Telegram. We are announcing the discontinuation of our blockchain project. Below is a summary of what it was and why we had to abandon it,” Durov announced on his Telegram channel.
The much hyped project was to create a state-of-the-art blockchain with the associated Gram coin that was to become a platform for commercialising blockchain. Despite all the hype surrounding blockchain there has yet to be a single widely used commercial application of the technology partly due to the difficulties related to the lack of a widely used and accessible platform.
“For the last 2,5 years some of our best engineers have been working on a next-generation blockchain platform called TON and a cryptocurrency we were going to name Gram. TON was designed to share the principles of decentralization pioneered by Bitcoin and Ethereum, but to be vastly superior
12 RUSSIA Country Report June 2020 www.intellinews.com
