Russia's National Settlement Depository (NSD), the country's stock market clearing agency, is testing a new commercial bond trading platform built on top of the Hyperledger blockchain consortium's Fabric software, NSD said on October 3.

"The ultimate goal [of the] NSD is to build blockchain infrastructure for any innovative financial product to operate on," Eddie Astanin, chairman of the NSD's executive board, said in a statement.

"Once the infrastructure is created, [the] technology holds potential to deliver a large variety of financial products and services operated by smart contracts," he added.

The project comes as part of NSD's wider scheme of blockchain-related initiatives that also includes a crypto currency wallet.

"Our goal is to create a secure and user-friendly accounting infrastructure for digital assets," Astanin said.

Russia has gone a bit blockchain bonkers since president Vladimir Putin latched onto the idea at the more recent St Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF).

"Blockchain is now the number task," first deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov said at the SPIEF blockchain session, probably the third most powerful man in Russia. "The president is completely ill with this idea and understands that the gap and significant growth rates are based on the digital economy and technological leadership."

On October 2, major Russian mobile phone operator Megafon announced it will issue RUB500mn worth of blockchain bonds in the first ever Russian blockchain bond issuance.

In August, Russia's leading exchange, the Moscow Exchange (MOEX) joined the blockchain craze and by preparing infrastructure for a cryptocurrency trading platform.

Around the same time, state-run lender VEB announced the launch of a blockchain competence centre aimed at introducing the technology to the country's public sector.

Meanwhile, Russia’s Federal Agency for Technical Regulation and Metrology (Rosstandart) appointed a new technical committee to work on the standardization of "the software and hardware of distributed register and Blockchain technologies".

In September, Burger King Russia launched Whoppercoin, a cryptocurrency which can be traded for Whoppers.