What happened
The Bank of Russia released a draft regulatory package on Tuesday laying out how crypto trading, custody, and settlement would operate under a supervised regime, according to CryptoBriefing, which flagged the filing at 14:17 UTC. The document covers three pillars. Trading venues would need a license and would have to meet order-handling, disclosure, and market-abuse standards familiar from securities regulation. Custodians would face segregation of client assets, capital requirements, and reporting obligations tied to holdings. Settlement would run through approved agents, with rules on finality and reconciliation.
The central bank is Russia's primary financial regulator and has spent the last two years pivoting from an outright hostility to crypto toward a narrower, permission-based model. Tuesday's text is the clearest articulation of that model so far. It stops well short of opening retail markets; access is expected to remain gated to qualified investors, a category defined by asset thresholds and professional certification. The consultation period is standard practice before any binding regulation.
Why it matters
Russia has been the largest major economy running crypto in a legal grey zone. Mining is legal. Payments in crypto inside Russia are not. Cross-border settlement using digital assets was authorized in a limited pilot in 2024 for foreign trade, but the domestic secondary market has operated without a proper rulebook.
The draft changes that. It puts trading, custody, and settlement into one document, which is how mature markets structure disclosure and investor protection. For firms that have been sitting on the sidelines, a framework, even a restrictive one, is more usable than uncertainty. It also gives the central bank a supervisory hook over flows it currently cannot see clearly.