Russia Opens Crypto Trading After Years of Warnings

• Russian exchanges may legally start crypto trading once the central bank approves their rules.
• Retail investors can buy only Bitcoin, Ethereum and USDT, with a yearly purchase cap.
• The Moscow Exchange is preparing a gradual pilot that starts in December.
• Crypto stays banned as a means of payment inside Russia, even as trading opens up.

Russia’s stock exchanges will be legally allowed to run organized cryptocurrency trading from November 22, 2026, after the Ministry of Justice registered a Bank of Russia ordinance setting out how trading in digital currencies and digital rights must work. The central bank confirmed the registration on November 11. November 22 is only the earliest legal opening date, since each exchange first needs the regulator to approve its trading rules, and the Moscow Exchange is aiming for December 1. For a central bank that wanted sweeping crypto restrictions less than five years ago, this puts Bitcoin on the same supervised venues where Russians already trade stocks and the ruble.

Exchanges need their rulebooks approved first

The ordinance builds on the conditions for organised trading in digital currencies that the Bank of Russia first drafted in July. Before matching a single order, a venue has to agree its rules with the regulator and register the brokers, trust managers and central counterparties it admits. A central counterparty is the clearing entity that sits between buyer and seller and guarantees that both sides of a trade settle. Exchanges must keep a record of every order and executed trade, monitor the market for abuse, and report results to the central bank through the same channels they already use for securities and currencies.

Pricing works the same way it does in older markets. Each venue calculates a current price, a closing price, a market price and a volume-weighted average price for every asset. The volume-weighted average gives more weight to the price levels where more coins actually changed hands. All of this means crypto is entering a supervisory system Russian regulators have run for decades, with the same surveillance and reporting duties that apply to a ruble-dollar trade on the Moscow Exchange.

Sources: Bank of Russia, Moscow Exchange, SPB Exchange. Exchange dates are targets.

Moscow Exchange plans a gradual pilot

Boris Blokhin, senior managing director for sales and business development at the Moscow Exchange, said in October that the venue plans to offer crypto transactions from December 1. He added that it won’t need an extra license, although its rules still have to meet the new ordinance. Settlement will go through a partner digital depository, which is a licensed custodian that records who holds which coins and where participants open accounts before they trade. The exchange expects the first deals to be pilot trades, with professional participants joining as they become ready and Bitcoin, Ethereum and USDT making up the initial set.

SPB Exchange said in October that it wants to start organized crypto trading before the end of the year and is building its own settlement depository for the purpose. The infrastructure beneath both venues already exists on paper, since the Bank of Russia admitted the first digital depositories and cryptocurrency exchanges to the financial market on October 6 under the law’s transitional provisions.

₽300,000 per broker, and a test first

The retail rules the central bank published on November 6 limit ordinary investors to three assets. The regulator chose them based on market capitalization, average daily trading volume and at least five years of price history on foreign exchanges. Non-qualified investors are the large majority of retail clients, who don’t meet Russia’s wealth or experience thresholds for qualified status. They can buy up to ₽300,000 (about $3,700) a year through each intermediary. The Bank of Russia describes the cap per intermediary and hasn’t framed it as a single ceiling across all providers, so an investor with accounts at several brokers could end up buying more in total.

Source: Bank of Russia.

USDT’s place on the list stands out, because it is a dollar-pegged token entering a market built partly to reduce reliance on Western finance. Its inclusion says nothing about Tether’s own position, though. The issuer has not agreed to support Russian exchange infrastructure, and in March 2025 it froze wallets linked to Garantex, a Russian exchange under sanctions.

Why the 2022 crackdown plan became a rulebook

In January 2022 the Bank of Russia published a consultation paper calling for curbs on crypto issuance, circulation, exchange operations and mining, citing financial stability, consumer protection and the risk to monetary policy. The proposal never became a blanket ban. A 2020 law had already barred crypto as payment for goods and services, and that ban still holds. The invasion of Ukraine a month later changed the context, as Western sanctions cut Russian banks off from much of the international payments system. In 2024 Moscow legalized mining and allowed experimental crypto settlements in foreign trade.

Three explanations fit the evidence for what followed. The first is supervision. The central bank estimated in 2022 that Russians moved around $5 billion a year in crypto, most of it through foreign platforms and peer-to-peer deals that tax and anti-money-laundering authorities couldn’t see, and licensed brokers, custody and reporting bring that flow into view. The second is building an industry, since the regulator proposed minimum capital of ₽50 million to ₽250 million (about $620,000 to $3.1 million) for digital depositories, which favors established financial groups. Sanctions are the third and most cited driver of the broader policy reversal. However, no official document links them directly to the decision to open domestic exchange trading.

Exporters get freedoms domestic buyers don’t

The September law draws a clear line between the two halves of the economy. Exporters and importers may settle cross-border deals in crypto, and the law sets rules for transferring coins abroad and declaring foreign holdings to the tax authorities. Inside Russia, paying for goods with Bitcoin or USDT remains prohibited. Domestic exchange trading also doesn’t let sanctioned institutions deal with foreign counterparties, and Western compliance rules still apply to any transaction that touches their jurisdictions.

Offshore platforms face a licensed rival

Russian investors who until now bought crypto through foreign exchanges or peer-to-peer channels will soon have a domestic route. Their coins will sit with a licensed depository and prices will come from a regulated venue. Brokers have to run knowledge tests, deliver risk disclosures and track each client’s yearly cap before they can process a first order. Whether the new venues draw real activity depends on things nobody can measure yet, including fees, spreads and liquidity compared with offshore platforms. Neither exchange has published a forecast for trading volume, and several related regulations are still being finalized, so access will most likely come in phases after November 22.

The bigger shift comes later. According to the Bank of Russia, direct peer-to-peer crypto trading will be banned from July 1, 2027, and transfers from regulated digital accounts to self-custody wallets are already prohibited. Firms admitted under the transitional rules have until September 1, 2027, to fully comply with the new law. By the second half of next year, the licensed exchanges, brokers and depositories now preparing their December launches will be the only legal channel for most Russians who want to buy crypto.