Moscow Exchange, Russia’s largest trading venue, will begin trading bitcoin, ether and Tether’s USDT on Dec. 1, the exchange announced this week, calling it the country’s first organized market for digital currencies.
The launch puts bitcoin on the same screens Russians use to trade Sberbank and Gazprom shares. It also puts a major crypto venue inside an institution that sits under U.S. sanctions. The first phase will run as a pilot. Participants will connect as they are ready, and the exchange said interest has come from existing members, their clients and businesses that already use digital currencies for investment and settlement.
How the Moscow market will work
Trading will run on the exchange’s existing stock market technology and follow its stock market hours, from 6:50 a.m. to 11:50 p.m. Moscow time, the exchange told Russian newspaper Vedomosti. The National Clearing Centre, the exchange’s clearing arm, will clear every trade.
From day one, clients can settle trades the same day or the next day, and the exchange will offer swaps to help participants manage liquidity. BTC, ETH and USDT will trade in both addressed and addressless modes, and the list is set to grow over time with Russian and international instruments.
Custody will run through partner digital depositaries, a new type of entity created under the country’s rules. A Moscow Exchange executive first previewed the plan on Oct. 31.
Retail access is tight. Non-qualified investors must pass a test before they can buy, and they can purchase no more than 300,000 rubles of digital currency a year, roughly $3,700, through a single broker. Qualified investors face no cap. The exchange had first flagged plans to debut bitcoin trading in October.
For the exchange, the structure keeps crypto inside a regime it already runs. Brokers connect the way they do for equities, trades net through the same clearing system and investor classifications carry over from the stock market. That lowers the barrier for banks and brokerages that want to offer bitcoin without building separate custody and matching systems of their own.
Sanctions loom over USDT
The U.S. Treasury blocked Moscow Exchange and the National Clearing Centre in June 2024 as part of a broader push against Russia’s financial system over the war in Ukraine. That makes the clearing house holding customers’ USDT a sanctioned entity.
Tether routinely freezes wallets tied to addresses on the Treasury’s sanctions list, which raises questions about how the stablecoin issuer would treat USDT held through the Moscow clearing structure. Neither the exchange nor Tether has publicly addressed that issue.
The choice of USDT, a dollar-pegged token, is notable for a market built in part to operate outside the dollar system. Bitcoin and ether carry no issuer that can freeze balances.
Pulling offshore activity home
The market rests on Federal Law No. 282-FZ, “On Digital Currencies and Digital Rights,” whose main provisions took effect on Sept. 1. The law still bans using crypto for domestic payments, though exporters and importers can use it to settle cross-border trade.
Russian officials have spent the past year building the plumbing. Lawmakers handed securities regulators oversight of crypto last month, and the central bank licensed Sberbank for crypto work weeks earlier.
The goal is to move trading that Russians already do on offshore exchanges and peer-to-peer desks onto domestic, supervised rails where the state can see it and tax it. Moscow is betting that a familiar exchange, tied to brokers that Russian investors already use, can pull that volume back.
The open question is whether the caps and testing keep retail traders offshore, and whether foreign liquidity will touch a sanctioned venue at all. For now, Russia’s first organized bitcoin market opens on Dec. 1, with a pilot and a modest ceiling.
