Russia's State Duma Approves Comprehensive Cryptocurrency Law

Russia's State Duma, the lower house of its legislative body, 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 Russian President Vladimir Putin's signature after that, 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, but the delay came from coordination bottlenecks between government agencies, per reports by the Russian outlet Kommersant.

What the bill creates

The legislation sets up a licensing regime—a government-issued permit system—for crypto exchanges, brokers, and custodians (companies that store cryptocurrency on your behalf, the way a bank holds cash). 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 (the total value of all coins in circulation) above 5 trillion rubles—roughly $65 billion—and at least five years of verified trading history on a licensed foreign exchange.

That currently narrows the field to two: 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—but even they cannot buy privacy coins (cryptocurrencies engineered to hide transaction data and wallet addresses). Monero (XMR), Zcash (ZEC), and Dash are out entirely.

"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 (anti-money laundering) being the financial checks every licensed platform must run on transactions under the new framework.

“Buy crypto” and “use crypto” are not the same thing

If you’re a Russian degen, the new legislation likely doesn’t give you much 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 to 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 the preservation of the Russian ruble in mind: "This allows Russian companies to use cryptocurrency to pay foreign counterparties, circumventing sanctions restrictions."

Russia has been under Western sanctions since 2014, with far steeper penalties following its 2022 invasion of Ukraine. The EU 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, 2026. 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.