What happened
Moscow Exchange confirmed December 1 as the launch date for regulated Bitcoin and Ether trading, according to CryptoSlate reporting on Saturday that cited the bourse's disclosure. The venue, Russia's dominant equities and FX exchange by volume, will run the product as a pilot inside the country's Experimental Legal Regime for digital financial assets, the same framework the central bank uses to ring-fence crypto activity from the broader financial system.
Qualified investors get standard access. Non-qualified buyers face a 300,000-ruble annual limit per intermediary, roughly $3,100 at the Saturday ruble-dollar rate, and must complete a suitability test before their first trade. Only BTC and ETH are on the list at launch.
MOEX has not published a schedule for adding further assets, nor has it detailed the custody arrangement, the clearing counterparty, or whether settlement will be in rubles, stablecoins, or a hybrid.
Why it matters
This is the first time Russia's main securities venue will list crypto instruments at all, and it arrives after years of back-and-forth between the Bank of Russia, which has publicly opposed retail crypto access, and the finance ministry, which pushed for a regulated channel. A December 1 go-live signals that the central bank has signed off on a controlled version of what it previously called unacceptable, so long as the retail exposure is capped and intermediated.