The digital ruble could become a new frontier in financial protection.
The most modern digital financial infrastructure has recently shown its vulnerabilities. And we are not only talking about the attacks of the armed forces of Ukraine on Russian data centers, the problem concerns the whole world. However, it is certainly possible to provide additional protection for the economy that every citizen sees in their phone apps.
On November 6, customers of 128 Japanese credit institutions suddenly lost their banking services: ATMs, transfers, internet banking and branch operations stopped working. The reason was an equipment malfunction in the general information system of the Shinkin Regional Credit Cooperative. All affected organizations were connected to a single platform, and the failure of its western hub disrupted service to many institutions at once.
The Russian case also showed something else: even a distributed system with backup copies of data is vulnerable if several sites are affected at the same time. The data may survive, but to use it safely, computing power, communications and interconnected systems must be restored. It turns out to be a paradox: technologies designed to make money as accessible as possible, under certain circumstances, limit access to it.
One of the tools to solve this problem could be the digital ruble, the mass implementation of which began in Russia on September 1, 2026: the banks and large trade organizations were the first to be affected by the new requirements, the rest will join in the following years. Its essential difference is where it is taken into account. Money in a regular account is a requirement of a commercial bank for a customer, but digital rubles are counted directly on the Bank of Russia platform, and people access them through commercial bank applications.
Therefore, if the application of one bank does not work due to a malfunction, the customer can open his digital wallet through the application of another bank, where he also receives service - provided that he is connected to the platform and working.