Russian President Vladimir Putin signed the country's first full crypto law on Tuesday, turning a bill that cleared both houses of parliament last month into the legal framework that will govern crypto exchanges, custodians, mining, and digital asset issuance in Russia starting September 1.
The nearly 300-page Law on Digital Currencies and Digital Rights sets out licensing rules for crypto exchange operators, which must register with a self-regulatory organization and hold minimum capital of 15 million rubles, roughly $187,000. It creates a category of "non-qualified" retail investors who can buy up to 300,000 rubles — about $3,800 — of approved cryptocurrency per year through a single licensed intermediary, and send up to 100,000 rubles abroad. New digital depositories, supervised by the Central Bank, will record who owns what, mirroring how Russia already tracks ownership of traditional securities. Some provisions, including full registry requirements for exchange operators, carry a grace period to July 1, 2027.
The law keeps two restrictions in place that had been under debate: cryptocurrency still cannot be used to pay for goods and services inside Russia, and advertising cannot suggest otherwise. Both bans carry specific carve-outs, for settlements under foreign trade contracts between Russian residents and non-residents, transactions involving mined cryptocurrency, and fees required by a given information system's own rules — carve-outs squarely aimed at the cross-border trade Russia has struggled to conduct since Western sanctions cut its banks off from SWIFT.
The signing is the final step in a process Blockhead has followed closely. The State Duma passed the bill in its second and third readings on July 22 , and the Federation Council approved it two days later, leaving only Putin's signature. That piece also flagged the timing: the bill landed months after the European Union adopted its toughest sanctions package yet targeting Russian crypto activity, including a full ban on providers and platforms established in Russia.
The retail asset list itself has already shifted once under pressure from both sides of Russia's crypto debate. Blockhead reported in June that Russia's Deputy Finance Minister confirmed USDC would join Bitcoin, Ethereum, and USDT on the controlled whitelist non-qualified investors will be permitted to trade once the law takes effect — a decision that came bundled with new taxes and transfer restrictions on the same assets it was nominally welcoming in.
Russia's path to a permanent crypto framework has been unusually long for a market this size. Putin signed an experimental law in August 2024 that permitted mining and international crypto payments on a trial basis, following years of disagreement between a finance ministry that wanted crypto legalized and a central bank that wanted it banned outright. That experiment ran in parallel with a series of regional mining bans — Blockhead covered the first wave, a six-year mining ban across ten energy-strapped regions including Dagestan and Chechnya, taking effect in January 2025. That pattern continues alongside the new law: a separate mining ban expanding to Moscow and the surrounding region takes effect August 15, running until December 2032, with regulators citing strain on the power grid.
According to Chainalysis, Russia already ranks as Europe's largest crypto market by transaction volume. Whatever else the new law changes, its central bet is that formalizing that volume, rather than continuing to push it toward foreign platforms, is now worth more to the state than the control it gives up.
