Mir payment cards, launched after the creation of the National System of Payment Cards in Russia, had to compete with the cards of the international payment systems VISA and MasterCard, which by that time had completely captured the Russian market. The Russian legislature, executive government and the Bank of Russia took a number of protectionist measures of a legal and organizational nature that provided the initial impetus for the diffusion of Mir cards among Russian citizens. In this article, we assess the value of this state support by viewing the payment card system as a two-sided platform and describing its development with equations of population dynamics. Our estimates obtained by simulation modeling show that at the time of decision-making, the value of state support for payment cards Mir amounted to about 3.5 billion rubles.