Leonid Bershidsky, Columnist

A Vast Blockchain Experiment Could Change Russia

Putin has failed to spark a tech revolution, and not for a lack of trying.

June 6, 2017 at 5:16 PM UTC

Leonid Bershidsky, formerly Bloomberg Opinion’s Europe columnist, is a member of the Bloomberg News Automation Team. He recently published Russian translations of George Orwell’s “1984” and Franz Kafka’s “The Trial.”

Putin's Steve Jobs?
Photographer: John Phillips/Getty Images for TechCrunch

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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. Their latest hopes are being pegged to the Ethereum blockchain platform.

QuickTake Vladimir Putin

At last week's St. Petersburg Economic Forum, Putin talked to Vitalik Buterin, the founder of Ethereum. Buterin's family emigrated from Russia to Canada when he was six. There, the math whiz got interested in Bitcoin while still in his teens. A $100,000 fellowship from Peter Thiel's foundation launched him on the Ethereum project.