Russia’s Finance Ministry has paid wages in digital rubles for the first time, the ministry announced Friday, marking the central bank digital currency’s first move from budget trials into the machinery of government payroll.
The digital ruble wages program began Oct. 1 and is available to Russian citizens on a voluntary basis, according to a ministry press release. The ministry did not disclose how many employees were paid in the digital currency or the total payroll amount disbursed.
Proven rails from the 2025 budget trials
The rollout leans on infrastructure already tested in the field. During federal budget spending trials in 2025, about 16 million digital rubles (roughly $192,245 at the time) was disbursed, the ministry said, meaning the salary procedure is running on rails that have already carried government payments once.
Work on embedding the digital ruble into the federal budget process is being carried out by the Bank of Russia together with the Ministry of Finance, according to the release — a division of labor that puts the central bank on the technical side and the ministry on the disbursement side.
A Sept. 1 launch meets EU sanctions
The central bank digital currency, in development since 2021, launched on Sept. 1, when major banks and retail companies began enabling transactions with the new currency, Cointelegraph reported in July. The digital ruble was designed as a complement to the fiat ruble and was initially accepted among financial and credit institutions.
The program has not gone unnoticed in Brussels. The European Council announced preemptive sanctions against the digital ruble in April, saying the restrictions were a response to Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine, which began in February 2022.
For now, the first wage payment is a small milestone — voluntary, unquantified, and domestic. But it is the point where a five-year CBDC project stops being a pilot and starts being payroll.
Source: Cointelegraph
