Russia moves to cap retail crypto trading at three tokens
From September, ordinary investors on regulated venues will be limited to bitcoin, ether and tether, with an annual purchase ceiling of about $3,600 per intermediary.
MOSCOW —
Russia's central bank is preparing rules that would restrict retail crypto trading on regulated domestic venues to three assets: bitcoin, ether and the dollar-pegged token tether. The measures are due to take effect on 1 September.
Investors who do not hold qualified status would face an annual purchase limit of 300,000 roubles, roughly $3,600, at each intermediary they use. Qualified investors, a category defined by income, assets and trading experience, would face no cap and a wider list of instruments.
The rules fill in details left open by legislation passed in July, which created a supervised channel for crypto investment while keeping a ban on using crypto for payments inside the country. In effect, the state is separating the asset from the currency: holding and trading become permissible in a fenced-off venue, spending does not.
Restricting the retail menu to two majors and a single stablecoin narrows the surface for fraud, but it also pushes anything else — altcoins, perpetual futures, onchain yield — onto offshore exchanges and peer-to-peer channels that supervisors cannot see. Similar caps in other jurisdictions have produced measurable migration rather than measurable reduction in activity.
Domestic brokers are expected to publish their own compliance procedures before the deadline. How intermediaries verify the annual ceiling across multiple platforms, and whether limits are aggregated per investor or per venue, remain the open operational questions.