Russia’s Finance Ministry has estimated the country’s daily cryptocurrency turnover at 50 billion rubles, or approximately $650 million, with annual activity exceeding 10 trillion rubles, around $130.5 billion.
The figures were shared by Deputy Finance Minister Ivan Chebeskov at the Alfa Talk conference, highlighting the growing scale of unregulated cryptocurrency use in the country, local outlet RBC reports.
“This is a turnover of more than 10 trillion rubles a year, which currently occurs outside the regulated zone, outside our attention,” Chebeskov said.
Government officials, including the Bank of Russia, are pushing to legislate that activity into the regulatory realm.
Vladimir Chistyukhin, First Vice President of the Central Bank, said that both the government and the Bank hope that a bill to regulate the cryptocurrency market will be approved during the spring session of the State Duma.
The proposed rules would allow existing licensed infrastructure, such as exchanges and brokers, to enter the cryptocurrency space and boost their cryptocurrency offerings. The Moscow Stock Exchange (MOEX) already offers bitcoins and ether cash-settled futures contracts and plans to add SOL, XRP and TRX futures.
The new framework would also allow MOEX and brokers to enter the spot market. Qualified and unqualified investors would be allowed to participate, although with restrictions for the latter. Specific licenses would only apply to cryptocurrency exchange offices, with penalties foreseen 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. Currently, these platforms are not regulated in Russia.
Sergey Shvetsov, chairman of the Supervisory Board of the Moscow Stock Exchange, said that Russian users pay about $15 billion annually in commissions to global crypto platforms.
“As soon as possible, we will start competing with the gray sector,” he said. “The commissions that cryptocurrency exchanges and regular exchanges receive annually for trading crypto assets are $50 billion; the Russian share is estimated to be about a third.”
In fact, Russia is estimated to be the largest cryptocurrency market in Europe. Chainalysis found that between July 2024 and June 2025, Russia received $376.3 billion in cryptocurrency, far ahead of the $273.2 billion the United Kingdom received during the same period. Germany and Ukraine were the only other European countries to receive more than $200 billion during the period.
