Bank of Russia Finalizes Crypto Trading Rules Ahead of Nov. 17 Launch

The Bank of Russia has finalized rules allowing exchanges to offer Bitcoin (BTC), Ether (ETH) and Tether USDt (USDT) to retail investors starting Nov. 17. The date marks the practical rollout of a law that took legal effect Sept. 1, and it converts a legislative framework into an operational market with named intermediaries and hard limits.

The core restriction is numerical. Non-qualified investors may purchase up to 300,000 rubles — roughly $3,700 — in cryptocurrency annually through each intermediary. That ceiling applies per channel, not per person, meaning an investor using a broker, an asset manager and a crypto exchange provider separately holds three distinct allowances under the letter of the rule. Whether regulators intended that multiplication effect is not addressed in the directive.

Qualified investors face no purchase limits at all. The distinction between the two classes, however, is not merely a threshold on paper: every investor, qualified or not, must pass a mandatory test before trading. The Bank of Russia has not detailed the test's content or failure conditions; a mandatory test without a published syllabus is a gate whose width remains unknown.

What led to the Nov. 17 date?

The finalized directive is the fourth step in a compressed regulatory sequence. President Vladimir Putin signed the underlying legislation on Aug. 4, establishing a regulated cryptocurrency market under central bank oversight. One week later, on Aug. 11, the Bank of Russia published draft regulations.

Those drafts set the eligibility criteria for the three permitted assets. BTC, ETH and USDT qualified on three measures: market capitalization, average daily trading volume and at least five years of price history on foreign exchanges. The five-year requirement is the binding constraint — it excludes every token launched after 2019 or 2020 from the initial roster, and no timeline exists for expanding the list.

The law took effect Sept. 1. In October, the Bank of Russia authorized Sberbank, the country's largest bank, to offer crypto exchange services — the first concrete institutional approval under the new regime. Sberbank's authorization came before the retail rules were finalized, which suggests the central bank sequenced institutional readiness ahead of public access.

Where will trading actually happen?

Moscow Exchange, Russia's largest securities exchange and a publicly traded company, plans to launch cryptocurrency trading on Dec. 1, roughly two weeks after the retail rules take effect. The launch will begin with pilot transactions limited to the three approved cryptocurrencies.

That schedule leaves a gap. Retail trading becomes legally possible on Nov. 17, but the flagship venue does not go live until Dec. 1; the identity of intermediaries operating in that interim window is not specified in the finalized rules.

What happens to peer-to-peer trading?

The expansion through regulated channels comes with a corresponding contraction elsewhere. Direct peer-to-peer crypto trading will be prohibited starting July 1, 2027 — a delay of more than two and a half years from the retail launch.

That delay cuts both ways. It gives P2P users a long runway to migrate to regulated platforms, but it also signals that authorities expect a transition period rather than an immediate shutdown. Whether the 2027 deadline holds or arrives earlier through interim measures remains an open question.

Two restrictions are already in force. Transfers from regulated digital accounts to self-custody wallets are banned now, according to the Bank of Russia, and the prohibition on using cryptocurrency to pay for goods and services remains in place. The self-custody transfer ban is the operationally significant one: it walls the regulated system off from private wallets, meaning assets bought through Sberbank or Moscow Exchange cannot move to hardware or software wallets under investor control. Investors who buy in the regulated market are, in effect, buying exposure held within that market.

For scale, the $3,700 annual retail cap represents a fraction of average Russian household savings, positioning the allowance as an entry point rather than a vehicle for significant allocation. Qualified investors — those meeting asset or experience thresholds — carry the substantive volume.

The near-term checkpoint is Dec. 1, when Moscow Exchange's pilot will test whether the new plumbing works with real transactions.