Russian Firm Will Reward Staff With Crypto Tokens Tied to Profits

Qiwi Blockchain Technologies, a subsidiary of the Russian e-payments firm Qiwi, plans to incentivize staff by rewarding them with a custom token.

According to a report from Russian news agency Interfax on Monday, QBT - which was launched in March to develop in-house blockchain solutions and provide consultation services around token issuance - plans to issue a token that is tied to the company's profit.

Konstantine Koltsov, a partner at the firm, told CoinDesk that up to 50 percent of the net profit will be allocated for the rewards program, and each token will be worth around 0.001 percent of the net profit.

To determine how the rewards tokens are divided among staff, a second token will be used to assign voting rights.

Departments' heads will get different amounts of voting tokens according to their weight in the company, and will then be able to use them to decide the allocation of bonus tokens among other staff.

In the future, voting tokens will also be handed out to all employees of the firm to provide them with an opportunity to vote on management decisions and hiring and firing, for example.

They will also be able to evaluate their co-workers performances via the system, rewarding better performers with more bonus tokens.

One problem facing the program in the short-term is that, due to the absence of crypto regulation in Russia, the tokens can't be cashed out into fiat currency such as rubles.

Holding them will make employees eligible for quarterly bonuses proportional to the amount of tokens owned.

The system supporting the tokens - which are based on ethereum's ERC-721 standard - is built on the Masterchain platform, according to the firm.