The head of the Yandex technologies development department Grigory Bakunov has called emerging decentralisation the main trend of the upcoming year, and made a special reference to blockchain.

In his speech at a Feedback conference, the Yandex representative outlined the fact that 2015 has become the year of distributed economy, noting that blockchain has seen the rapid growth “no one could expect.”

Expressing his hope that the tendency will go stronger throughout the decade, Bakunov stated that, in his opinion, the leading role in the process will be played by blockchain technology which, unlike bitcoin, is not limited strictly to money.

“The bitcoin concept is about money but blockchain, the technology that underpins it, is quite interesting by itself. It lets us build wonderful things… a distributed monetary/non-monetary system. The technology will be used by the whole fintech sphere next year and will hopefully break through its limits,” he said.

The head of the Yandex technologies development department believes that, with the help of blockchain, 2016 will become the first year when credit scoring will become automatised.

Yandex is a Russian IT-company, the 4th world’s largest search engine, and Internet services provider.

Yandex is not the first big company in Russia to praise blockchain. The country’s major bank Sberbank is currently considering joining R3 consortium. QIWI hopes to launch its own cryptocurrency underpinned by the technology, and even the Ministry of Finance, which strictly opposes the idea of digital money, claims that blockchain is worth paying attention to and developing.


Maria Rudina