Mir (, ; ) is a Russian card payment system for electronic fund transfers established by the Central Bank of Russia under a law adopted on 1 May 2017. The system was developed by Belgian digital payments company OpenWay and is operated by the , a wholly owned subsidiary of the Central Bank of Russia. Mir does not itself issue cards, extend credit or set rates and fees for consumers; rather, Mir provides financial institutions with Mir-branded payment products that they then use to offer credit, debit, or other programs to their customers. The development and implementation of Mir was spurred by the imposition of international sanctions against Russia in 2014 to circumnavigate the reliance on the likes of Visa and Mastercard, which were blocked in Russia at the time. History Mir, as an idea, was born out of a series of joint initiatives between the Central Bank of Russia and the World Bank in the mid-2000s that aimed to create a framework of an autonomous payment processing system inside the Russian Federation. While development was nearing completion, the Global Financial Crisis put further activity on indefinite hold. Mir cards were initially accepted mostly by Russia-based companies, such as Aeroflot and Russian Railways, but it gradually became popular among foreign companies with operations in Russia. In April 2016, AliExpress became the first foreign company to accept Mir as a form of payment within the Russian Federation, and McDonald's was the first U.S. company to accept it three months later. The system was developed by Belgian digital payments company OpenWay, which created a subsidiary in Russia called OpenWay Solutions, to meet Russian government requirements. On the basis of the initial groundwork, Mir as a system was formalized in 2014 as a way to overcome potential blocks of electronic payments, after several Russian banks were denied services by US-based Visa and MasterCard because of the sanctions regime against them. The first cards working on the Mir system were launched in December 2015. Sberbank, Russia's leading bank, started issuing them in October 2016. Six months later, in July 2016, McDonald's became the first U.S. company to accept Mir for payment in the Russian Federation. By the end of 2016, 1.76 million Mir cards had been issued by 64 banks; five years later, by the end of December 2021, over 113.6 million cards were in circulation. In 2020, 3.5 billion payments were issued using