The Russian Finance Ministry has estimated the country’s daily cryptocurrency turnover at 50 billion rubles, or about $650 million, with annual activity exceeding 10 trillion rubles, or about $130.5 billion.
The figures were shared by Deputy Finance Minister Ivan Chebeskov at the Alfa Talk conference, highlighting the growing scale of unregulated crypto use in the country, local media outlet RBC reports.
“This is a turnover of more than 10 trillion rubles per year, which is currently taking place outside the regulated zone, outside our attention,” Chebeskov said.
Government officials, including the Bank of Russia, are now pushing for legislation to bring this activity into the regulatory framework.
Vladimir Chistyukhin, first vice president of the Central Bank, said the government and the Bank hope that a bill on crypto market regulation will be adopted during the spring session of the State Duma.
The proposed rules would allow existing licensed infrastructures, such as exchanges and brokers, to enter the cryptocurrency space and strengthen their cryptocurrency offerings. The Moscow Stock Exchange (MOEX) already offers Bitcoin and ether cash-settled futures contracts and plans to add SOL, XRP and TRX futures contracts.
The new framework would also allow MOEX and brokers to access the spot market. Both accredited and non-accredited investors would be allowed to participate, but with restrictions for the latter. A specific license would only apply to cryptocurrency exchanges, and sanctions are planned for unlicensed intermediaries.
According to the Bank of Russia’s Financial Stability Report, Russian users held approximately 933 billion rubles ($11.89 billion) on global crypto exchanges as of mid-2025. These platforms are currently not regulated in Russia.
Sergey Shvetsov, chairman of the supervisory board of the Moscow Stock Exchange, said that Russian users pay around $15 billion a year in commissions to global crypto platforms.
“As soon as it is possible, we will start to compete with the gray sector,” he said. “The commissions that crypto exchanges and regular exchanges receive annually from trading crypto assets amount to $50 billion; the Russian share is estimated to be about a third.”
Russia is in fact considered the largest cryptocurrency market in Europe. Chainalysis revealed that between July 2024 and June 2025, Russia received $376.3 billion in crypto, well ahead of the $273.2 billion received by the United Kingdom during the same period. Germany and Ukraine are the only other European countries to have received more than $200 billion over this period.
