Russia’s Ministry of Finance has estimated the country’s daily cryptocurrency turnover at 50 billion rubles, or about $650 million, with annual activity exceeding 10 trillion rubles, 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, reports local outlet RBC.
“This is a turnover of more than 10 trillion rubles a year, which currently takes 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 fold.
Vladimir Chistyukhin, First Deputy Chairman of the Central Bank, said that both the government and the bank hope that a bill on regulating the crypto market will be passed during the State Duma’s spring session.
The proposed regulations will allow existing licensed infrastructure, such as exchanges and brokers, to enter the cryptocurrency space and increase their crypto offerings. Moscow Exchange (MOEX) already offers bitcoin and ether cash-settled futures contracts and plans to add SOL, XRP and TRX futures.
The new framework will also allow MOEX and brokers to enter the spot market. Qualified and non-qualified investors will be allowed to participate, albeit with restrictions on the latter. Specific license will only apply to crypto exchange offices and sanctions are planned for unlicensed intermediaries.
According to the Bank of Russia’s Financial Stability Report, Russian users had an estimated 933 billion rubles ($11.89 billion) on global crypto exchanges by mid-2025. These platforms are currently not regulated in Russia.
Sergey Shvetsov, chairman of the Moscow Stock Exchange’s supervisory board, said Russian users pay about $15 billion annually in commissions to global crypto platforms.
“As soon as it becomes possible, we will start competing with the gray sector,” he said. “The commissions that crypto-exchanges and regular exchanges receive from trading in crypto-assets annually is $50 billion; there are estimates that the Russian share is about a third.”
Russia is actually estimated to be the largest cryptocurrency market in Europe. Chainalysis found that between July 2024 and June 2025, Russia received $376.3 billion in crypto, far ahead of the $273.2 billion the UK received in the same period. Germany and Ukraine were the only other European countries to have received over $200 billion for the period.
