Much like food and water, bitcoin is a life necessity—that was the conclusion the vice president of Russian state bank Vnesheconombank came up with.

In an interview with Russian newspaper Kommersant, Nikita Smirnov described the popular digital currency as “the only successful implementation of blockchain technology currently in existence,” and likened bitcoin to a “positive bacteria.”

“Viruses are negative bacteria,” Smirnov said, according to the report. “But bitcoin in many sense represents positive bacteria which meet a person’s specific needs… and allows him to exist. Bitcoin is the world’s only blockchain technology to have achieved wide usage and which continues to exist after years of people trying to beat it down but has not failed.”

Meanwhile, Herman Gref, chief of the country’s largest bank, Sberbank, recently forecasted that an industrial-scale blockchain deployment in the country will be possible by 2019.