Federal Law No. 223-FZ: Digital Currency ELR for Foreign Trade

The statute amends six federal laws covering the Bank of Russia, currency regulation and control, the national payment system, organized trading, experimental legal regimes, and digital financial assets and digital currency. Rather than establishing an open cryptocurrency payment system, it permits an ELR program to replace or disapply specified legal rules within a defined experiment.

The Bank of Russia is designated as the authorized and regulating body for financial-market ELRs covered by the amendments. It approves an ELR program through a Bank of Russia normative act and interacts with applicants and participants through its information resources. The program supplies the operational details that the federal statute does not set universally.

The amended currency-control law permits an ELR program to modify the treatment of digital-currency operations. This includes using digital currency as a means of payment under foreign-trade contracts between residents and nonresidents for goods, works, services, information, and intellectual-property results or rights. The program may also define the rights and duties of the parties and of currency-control bodies and agents.

The amendments to the digital-financial-asset law provide for foreign-trade digital-currency transactions through an “authorized organization” identified by the ELR program. That organization is to facilitate transactions between ELR participants, while the program determines its rights, duties, and interaction procedures. Separate amendments allow special rules for electronic platforms and operators that provide settlement services for transactions conducted through those platforms.

For organized digital-currency trading, an ELR program may alter admission rules for digital currencies treated as commodities and set requirements for trading organizers or trading systems. The broader ELR amendments require risk assessment and permit limits on transaction volumes, asset types, participant categories, and the number of persons involved.

Approval of the relevant ELR requires coordination with federal authorities responsible for anti-money laundering and counter-terrorist financing, state security, and financial-market policy. Monitoring provisions address risks to state interests, defense, financial stability, economic security, critical information infrastructure, protected information, personal data, and AML/CFT objectives. These controls make the regime materially narrower than a general crypto exchange or payment authorization.

The framework is best understood as enabling legislation plus a program-specific sandbox. Eligibility, transaction procedures, settlement infrastructure, permitted assets, operational limits, and participant obligations depend on the Bank of Russia’s ELR program and related regulatory instruments.

The State Duma adopted the measure on July 30, 2024, the Federation Council approved it on Aug. 2, and it was signed and officially published on Aug. 8. Article 7 made the law operative from Sept. 1, 2024. Before enactment, the Bank of Russia said participant numbers and the experiment’s duration would be limited.

In its 2024 results, published on March 28, 2025, the Bank of Russia stated that it had launched the first ELR enabling exporters and importers to conduct cross-border cryptocurrency settlements. As of June 22, 2026, Federal Law No. 223-FZ remains in force. Public sources reviewed for this profile do not provide a comprehensive participant roster, complete program text, or a precise public launch date for the first settlement ELR. The law should therefore be described as an operative statutory framework with a regulator-controlled experiment, not as a general right to use cryptocurrency for domestic payments.