Sanctioned Moscow Exchange to Launch Bitcoin, Ether, USDT Trading Dec. 1

Moscow Exchange, Russia's largest trading venue and a target of U.S. Treasury sanctions since June 2024, will begin trading bitcoin, ether and Tether's USDT on Dec. 1, the exchange announced this week. The exchange called the launch the country's first organized market for digital currencies, putting BTC on the same screens Russians use to trade Sberbank and Gazprom shares.

The first phase will run as a pilot, with participants connecting as they are ready. The exchange said interest has come from existing members, their clients and businesses that already use digital currencies for investment and settlement. A Moscow Exchange executive first previewed the plan on Oct. 31, and the exchange flagged plans to debut bitcoin trading in October.

How the Moscow market will work

Trading will run on the exchange's existing stock market technology and follow stock market hours, from 6:50 a.m. to 11:50 p.m. Moscow time, the exchange told the Russian newspaper Vedomosti. The National Clearing Centre, the exchange's clearing arm, will clear every trade.

From day one, clients can settle trades same-day or next-day, and the exchange will offer swaps to help participants manage liquidity. BTC, ETH and USDT will trade in both addressed and addressless modes, and the instrument list is set to grow over time with Russian and international assets.

Custody will run through partner digital depositaries, a new type of entity created under Russian rules. Retail access remains tight:

• Non-qualified investors must pass a test before buying.
• Their purchases are capped at 300,000 rubles of digital currency per year — roughly $3,700 — through a single broker.
• Qualified investors face no cap.

For the exchange, the structure keeps crypto inside a regime it already operates. Brokers connect the way they do for equities, trades net through the same clearing system, and investor classifications carry over from the stock market. That lowers the barrier for banks and brokerages that want to offer bitcoin without building separate custody and matching infrastructure of their own.

Sanctions loom over USDT

The U.S. Treasury blocked Moscow Exchange and the National Clearing Centre in June 2024 as part of a broader campaign against Russia's financial system over the war in Ukraine. That means the clearing house holding customers' USDT is itself a sanctioned entity.

Tether routinely freezes wallets tied to addresses on the Treasury's sanctions list, which raises the question of how the issuer would treat USDT held through the Moscow clearing structure. Neither the exchange nor Tether has publicly addressed the issue. The choice of USDT, a dollar-pegged token, is notable for a market built in part to operate outside the dollar system. Bitcoin and ether carry no issuer that can freeze balances.

Pulling offshore activity home

The market rests on Federal Law No. 282-FZ, "On Digital Currencies and Digital Rights," whose main provisions took effect on Sept. 1. The law still bans crypto for domestic payments, though exporters and importers can use it to settle cross-border trade.

Russian officials have spent the past year building the regulatory plumbing. Lawmakers handed securities regulators oversight of crypto last month, and the central bank licensed Sberbank for crypto work weeks earlier.

The goal is to move trading that Russians already conduct on offshore exchanges and peer-to-peer desks onto domestic, supervised rails where the state can observe and tax it. Moscow is betting that a familiar exchange, tied to brokers Russian investors already use, can pull that volume home.

What does this change for practitioners? Russian brokers gain a turnkey route into crypto without new infrastructure, while international firms confront the question of whether any liquidity or counterparty exposure to a sanctioned venue is tenable.

The open question is whether the caps and testing regime keep retail traders offshore, and whether foreign liquidity will touch a sanctioned venue at all. For now, Russia's first organized bitcoin market opens on Dec. 1, with a pilot structure and a modest ceiling.