Ethereum, Bitfury and Vnesheconombank, and Russian Investing Corporation, will participate in the creation of the first Russian competence center for studying blockchain technologies.

The center will be established on the basis of the Moscow Institute of Steel and Alloys, Sergey Gorkov, chairman of Vnesheconobank, said.

“We intend to make this center in cooperation with them, it is scheduled to be opened in September, and we have been working with them for a long time, according to the pilot project in Rosreestr, I mean, on a pilot interior project of VEB. We are now planning to move from the sandbox to the competence center,” he said.

The center will mainly focused on consolidating various knowledges about innovative technologies, on developing platforms for their use in government organisations, and on training specialists and popularisation of related knowledge and ideas, the state corporation explained in a statement. TASS reports. VEB plans to develop a national blockchain based on Ethereum and on the Exonum platform created by Bitfury. It will also be involved in the certification of cryptography systems, training technology seminars and certification of specialists and trainers. In the long term, VEB plans to introduce prototypes created on the basis of the center into industries, Gorkov noted.

“We are glad that there will be great projects from the point of view of prototypes, and we will be ready to evaluate and finance them,” he said.

According to the plan of VEB and its partners, domestic state-owned companies and government bodies should become main consumers of future blockchain prototypes and solutions.