Infrastructure for the Cryptocurrency Market is Forming in Russia

On December 23, 2025, the Bank of Russia published its concept for cryptocurrency regulation, in which digital currencies and stablecoins are recognized as currency values, operations with which can be carried out through the existing financial infrastructure and licensed professional market participants (exchanges, brokers, and asset managers. A separate category will consist of newly created crypto exchangers and digital depositories.

Recognition of cryptocurrency as property determines the possibility of conducting buy-sell transactions with them in the national jurisdiction, but does not allow use as a means of payment.

Residents will be able to conduct cryptocurrency transactions only through licensed institutions organizing the circulation of digital currencies.

This concept forms the basis of the bill “On Digital Currency and Digital Rights”, which the Central Bank is developing jointly with the Ministry of Finance and which is intended to form the architecture of the legal Russian crypto market by mid-2026.

Overall, regulation of the crypto market and supervision of its participants are being formed in the logic of regulating the traditional securities market. The list of new institutions organizing cryptocurrency circulation includes crypto exchangers and digital depositories.

They will be obliged to detect and block fraudulent and criminal operations under Federal Law 115-FZ “On Countering the Legalization (Laundering) of Criminally Obtained Income and Financing of Terrorism”.

The digital depository is highlighted as a separate licensed structure, intended for accounting rights to digital currencies, transfer of these rights, and transfer of cryptocurrencies as a result of concluded transactions.

Accounting of crypto market participants' assets in information systems will be carried out based on address-identifiers (representing a specific sequence of numbers), on the basis of which the cryptocurrency owner will be determined.

At the same time, the depository will be obliged to provide access to address-identifiers storing cryptocurrency upon request from state and supervisory authorities in cases provided by law.

The Russian crypto market system will also need to create specialized companies for transactions with digital currency and digital rights on organized trading, which implies they have an exchange or trading system license.

Admission of investors to cryptocurrency operations will be carried out based on their testing results and taking into account annual transaction volume limits. All legal cryptocurrency operations cease to be anonymous not only due to the identification requirement for transaction participants, but also due to the need to confirm testing results for conducting them and control annual limits for qualified and non-qualified market participants.

The Bank of Russia's concept provides for the introduction from July 1, 2027, of liability for illegal activities of intermediaries in the cryptocurrency market similar to liability for illegal banking activities.

Author: Doctor of Economic Sciences, Professor of the Department of World Economy and World Finance at the Financial University under the Government of the Russian Federation, Lyubov Vyacheslavovna Krylova