Russia's State Duma votes Tuesday on a comprehensive crypto law that would permit Bitcoin and Ethereum for international trade, cap regular investors at 300,000 rubles, and ban privacy coins.
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Russia's State Duma, the lower house of the legislature, takes its final two votes on the country's first comprehensive cryptocurrency law on Tuesday.
The bill, titled "On Digital Currency and Digital Rights," still needs Senate approval and President Vladimir Putin's signature, a process Anatoly Aksakov, chairman of the State Duma Committee on Financial Markets, expects to take another two weeks. The law would then take effect on September 1.
The original target was July 1. The delay came from coordination bottlenecks between government agencies, per reports by the Russian outlet Kommersant.
The legislation creates a licensing regime, a government-issued permit system, for crypto exchanges and brokers. Custodians -- companies that store digital assets -- also need licenses. The Bank of Russia becomes the authority issuing those permits and can bar any cryptocurrency it deems a threat to financial stability.
Major financial institutions aren't waiting. VTB and T-Bank have already announced plans to build crypto depositories.
Not every coin qualifies. To trade legally in Russia, a cryptocurrency needs a market capitalization above 5 trillion rubles, roughly $65 billion, and at least five years of verified trading history on a licensed foreign exchange.
That narrows the field to two for now: Bitcoin and Ethereum. Alexandra Fedotova, a lawyer at White Stone who has been tracking the legislation, told Russian outlet Parlamentskaya Gazeta that the Bank of Russia would likely release a list of the top five or 10 most traded cryptocurrencies on major exchanges.
"These will definitely include BTC and ETH," she said. "Possibly SOL or TON may be added, given their popularity in Russia. Everything else is only for qualified investors."
Regular investors -- people without professional credentials -- face an annual purchase cap of 300,000 rubles, about $3,800, through a single licensed intermediary. Professional investors face no such limit. Even they cannot buy privacy coins, cryptocurrencies engineered to hide transaction data and wallet addresses.
Monero and Zcash are out entirely. Dash faces the same restriction, Fedotova said.
"The CBR directly states: you cannot buy coins that hide recipients," Fedotova said. "If you can't build a transaction graph and see where the money came from, such an asset will not pass AML verification." AML meaning the anti-money laundering checks every licensed platform must run.
If you are a Russian retail investor, the new legislation does not offer much reason to celebrate. You still cannot buy anything with crypto inside Russia.
The law permits cryptocurrency only for international trade. Russian companies paying foreign partners in Bitcoin can route transactions outside Western banking channels. The ruble stays Russia's only legal payment at home.
Kaplan Panesh, deputy chair of the State Duma's Budget and Taxes Committee, explained when the bill passed its first reading in April that legislators designed the bill with preservation of the ruble in mind. "This allows Russian companies to use cryptocurrency to pay foreign counterparties, circumventing sanctions restrictions," he said.
Russia has been under Western sanctions since 2014, with far steeper penalties following its 2022 invasion of Ukraine. The European Union moved in February to ban all crypto transactions with Russian entities. Moscow kept legislating.
Putin signed Russia's crypto mining law in August 2024, making Russia the world's second Bitcoin producer after the United States, according to the Hashrate Index. The new bill layers trading and settlement rules on top of that, completing the regulatory picture Moscow has been building since the first sanctions hit.
Unlicensed platforms face a full ban starting July 1, 2027.
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