Russia Draft Digital Currency Market Regulation Framework

The package builds on the Bank of Russia’s December 2025 cryptocurrency-regulation concept. It would consolidate the current fragmented approach into a unified structure covering digital currencies, digital financial assets, utility and hybrid digital rights, foreign digital rights, and the placement and circulation of those instruments. The explanatory note says the framework is intended to improve market transparency, establish service standards, protect investors, and support implementation of Financial Action Task Force Recommendation 15.

The bill would define the principal market activities and the persons permitted to conduct them. Existing licensed exchanges, brokers, and trustees could perform specified functions, while dedicated digital depositories, digital-currency exchange organizations, and placement operators would enter Bank of Russia registers or obtain the permissions required for their activities. The companion bill would align related federal statutes with the proposed framework.

The Bank of Russia would receive broad authority to admit, regulate, and supervise organizers of digital-currency and digital-rights circulation. The proposed model uses regulated intermediaries and recordkeeping duties rather than treating all crypto activity as a single category. It also includes transitional routes for certain banks, brokers, and participants in Russia’s experimental legal regime.

Access would depend partly on investor status. Individuals would face testing and risk-notice requirements. A non-qualified investor could acquire only digital currencies admitted to public trading by a Russian trading organizer and could be subject to an annual limit set by the Bank of Russia. The central bank’s earlier concept proposed a ₽300,000 annual limit through one intermediary, but the bill itself delegates the exact ceiling to a later Bank of Russia rule. Qualified individual investors would also be tested, while receiving broader access under the draft.

The bill would preserve the prohibition on accepting digital currency as payment for goods, services, securities, digital rights, or other domestic consideration in Russia. It would, however, permit digital currency as consideration under qualifying foreign-trade contracts between residents and nonresidents. The draft also establishes digital-depository accounts and rules for transfers to externally administered addresses. Certain claims involving holdings outside regulated depositories would receive judicial protection only when the holder has made the tax-law disclosures required by Russian law.

Legal entities and individual entrepreneurs would generally conduct mining after entry in the relevant registry. Russian individuals who are not entrepreneurs could mine without registration when their electricity use stays below limits set by the Government. The wider framework also addresses mining pools, infrastructure operators, issuance and placement of digital rights, disclosure by issuers, and circulation of foreign digital rights.

Article 49 of the introduced text proposes July 1, 2026 as the commencement date for most provisions. It postpones two central rules until July 1, 2027: the rule limiting organization of digital-currency circulation to listed categories of intermediaries and the general requirement that residents transact through authorized organizers, subject to stated exceptions. Because the bill was still pending shortly before the first proposed date, editors should treat the timetable as draft language that may be amended.

The next formal steps are committee and amendment work, a second reading, a third reading, Federation Council consideration, presidential action, and publication. The Bank of Russia would also need to issue substantial implementing rules, including detailed admission criteria, investor limits, registers, reporting, and supervisory requirements. This profile should therefore be updated when a revised second-reading text or a new official timetable appears.