Crypto in Russia: How the Law Routes a Purchase Through a Registered Intermediary — and What It Stops Short of Promising

A Russian resident may lawfully hold cryptocurrency and lawfully buy it: the law calls it digital currency and recognises it as property. The foundation is Federal Law No. 282-FZ of 4 August 2026 "On Digital Currencies and Digital Rights", in force since 1 September 2026. The same law sets the conditions: transactions by residents run through intermediaries entered in the Bank of Russia register (that requirement becomes mandatory on 1 July 2027), the breadth of access depends on investor status, and paying with digital currency for goods, work and services inside Russia remains prohibited.

A word on the boundary of this text. It names no venues and does not answer the question "where do I buy": it is about what is permitted and under which rule. TradeAlmanac is not an intermediary. We maintain a reference section on coins with prices, market capitalisation and price history, but no transaction is executed through it. What follows is the route from "is this allowed at all" to the list of items checked before a purchase. Particular questions are handled in separate pieces, and the link to each sits where the question arises.

Property you are not allowed to pay with

Law No. 282-FZ recognises digital currency as property. That answers the first half of the question: holding it, and transacting in it under the established procedure, is lawful. The second half of the answer is a prohibition, and it has not gone anywhere. Digital currency may not be used in Russia as a means of payment or as consideration for goods, work and services. The wording reaches further than "paying at a till": the reference to consideration also covers the case where digital currency is handed over not as money, but in exchange for a good or a job of work.

A distinction worth holding on to: buying, holding and selling are one group of acts, settling a bill is another. The first group is permitted, the second is not.

The payment ban is older than the new law. Before September 2026, digital currency was described by Federal Law No. 259-FZ of 31 July 2020, and its upshot was the same: you may own, you may not pay for goods and services. What the new law changed is something else. A procedure for the transaction itself appeared: who may conduct it, who is admitted to it, and subject to which restrictions. Exactly what the rule says about property, and how to read the edge of the prohibition, is set out in the piece on the legal status of cryptocurrency in Russia.

The registered intermediary: who stands between the buyer and the coin

The law channels residents' transactions through licensed intermediaries — organisers of digital currency circulation. There are several categories of participant: digital currency exchanges, brokers, managers, depositories and exchange services. The register is maintained by the Bank of Russia. The first check therefore requires no trust in advertising: either the organisation appears in the regulator's register, or it does not.

The role names are familiar from the securities market — there, too, you find a broker, a depository and an exchange. But a coincidence of words is not a coincidence of rights. These are categories introduced by the digital currency law, and this text makes no claim that a licence on the stock market carries with it the right to work with digital currency. The answer is given by the entry in the Bank of Russia register, not by a signboard or a familiar name.

There is a transitional period, and it is easy to misread. The law has applied since 1 September 2026, but the requirement for residents to transact only through such intermediaries takes effect later than the core provisions — under the law, from 1 July 2027. Which regime covers a transaction carried out by another route inside that gap is determined by the law's transitional provisions and by Bank of Russia acts. We will not paraphrase those from memory: the version in force on the day of the transaction is checked against the primary source.

The terms offered by any given intermediary — fees, custody arrangements, withdrawal of money and of the digital currency itself — are set by the contract with it and by the regulator's acts. There is no general answer to those questions here, and no summary substitutes for reading the contract.

Investor status decides what is available, and up to how much

Buyers are divided along a line familiar from the securities market: there is the retail investor and there is the qualified investor. For the first, access is narrowed from several directions at once.

1. Testing. Access opens only after it. The concept itself appears in our glossary — investor testing — but the content of the assessment for digital currency is set by the regulator's acts.
2. The list. What may be bought is not any digital currency, but only one included in a limited list of the most liquid. Both the list and the selection criteria are determined by the Bank of Russia.
3. The monetary cap. Under the draft Bank of Russia regulation published on 11 August 2026, purchases are capped at RUB 300,000 per year with a single intermediary.

The last item needs a caveat. The figure comes from a draft, and a draft is not an act in force: the adopted version may name something different. It is inserted here from our register of legal provisions together with the date it was last checked, but before a transaction it is verified against the regulation as currently in force. How purchases across several intermediaries at once are aggregated is likewise a matter for the regulator's act in force. All that is asserted here is that the cap is set per intermediary.

A qualified investor is not subject to that cap. That is the only difference in their position we assert here; the rest is determined by the law and the regulator's acts. What the status gives on the securities market, and what it costs to obtain, is described in the piece on qualified investor status.

One more distinction. The list selects for liquidity; testing is a condition of admission. Neither is a judgement about a future price. The bitcoin and ethereum pages in our section show price, market capitalisation and history, but they do not report whether a coin is on the Bank of Russia list. That is visible only in the list itself, and a coin's presence on our site says nothing about admission. The sequence for someone without the status — test, list, tracking the cap — is worked through in the piece on buying cryptocurrency as a retail investor.

Tax on a sale: income, costs, and who files the return

The tax side is set by Federal Law No. 418-FZ of 29 November 2024. Income from the sale of digital currency is subject to personal income tax at the investment-income rates: 13% while the annual base does not exceed RUB 2.4m, and 15% above that threshold. Transactions in digital currency are not subject to value added tax.

The tax base is not the whole amount received. Acquisition costs reduce it, but on one condition: they are evidenced by documents. From this follows a practical consequence that arises on the day of purchase, not on the day of sale. Documents showing when, from whom and at what price the digital currency was bought will be needed at the point of sale, and reconstructing them after the fact may well fail.

The second question is who calculates and pays. The rule reduces to a single condition: the individual files the return themselves unless the tax has been withheld by an intermediary acting as a tax agent. Whether a particular intermediary withholds the tax is something to establish with it before the transaction, not afterwards. What a tax return is and what it consists of is explained in the glossary.

The order of magnitude can be sketched in the sale tax calculator. It is built for the sale of a security: the rate scale in it is the same, but the reliefs it takes into account for securities cannot be carried over to digital currency by default. Whether investment deductions apply to it, and whether a loss on it can be netted against a result on securities, is determined by the Tax Code as currently in force. The piece on tax on the sale of cryptocurrency is devoted to this.

What the law does not promise

The law describes the procedure of a transaction, not its outcome. The legality of a purchase and its safety are different properties, and the first does not entail the second.

The price of digital currency is backed by nothing and guaranteed by no one. There is no obligor behind it — nobody owes the holder a return of money or a payment of income. Nor is there any insurance scheme for digital currency. A comparison with a bank deposit is apt here precisely because it runs against the grain of habitual expectations: a bank deposit is protected by the insurance scheme up to RUB 1.4m, while no comparable mechanism exists for digital currency.

The register of intermediaries changes none of that. An entry in it says who is permitted to conduct transactions, not what the asset will be worth tomorrow. The Bank of Russia list is not a quality mark either: it narrows the circle of available coins, but it says nothing about the price inside that circle. Alongside market risk stand counterparty risk — that is, the risk of the intermediary itself — and regulatory risk: part of the rulebook still exists only in draft. Each of these is taken separately in the piece on the risks of buying cryptocurrency.

The history chart on a coin page shows what happened to the price, and nothing more. Why no expectation can be derived from it is explained in the piece on past returns.

Digital currency and DFAs: a similar word, a different legal object

Buyers are often thrown off by a neighbouring concept — the digital financial asset. The difference is not technical but goes to the substance of the right. Behind a DFA stands an obligor: an issuer that has taken on an obligation and answers for it. Behind digital currency there is no such person.

Different rules grow out of that. Access to DFAs is set by Bank of Russia Regulation No. 7176-U of 23 September 2025, tax on them is calculated under Article 214.11 of the Tax Code, and the cap for a retail investor is their own. Rules read about one asset do not transfer to the other. A point-by-point comparison is in the piece on how cryptocurrency differs from DFAs, and the construction of digital rights themselves is described in the piece on what DFAs are.

What to check before the transaction, and where it is visible

The checks run in the order in which a refusal at an early step saves you the later ones.

1. The intermediary. Whether the organisation appears in the Bank of Russia register. The register is kept by the regulator, and it is verified with the regulator, not on the organisation's own page.
2. Your own status. Whether or not you are a qualified investor. That governs whether the monetary cap applies to you.
3. Testing. Whether it has been passed: for a retail investor this is a condition of access.
4. The coin. Whether it is on the list the Bank of Russia sets for retail investors.
5. The cap. What figure the regulation in force records, and how much of it has already been used with this intermediary.
6. Tax. Whether the intermediary withholds it, and what purchase documents will remain in your hands.
7. The date. Which version of the law and of the regulations applies on the day of the transaction.

Not one of these items is checked by us: TradeAlmanac holds no register of intermediaries, no list of admitted coins and no information about investor status, and we do not pretend otherwise. What is visible here is something else — the asset itself. The coins section holds prices, market capitalisation and history. How to read the capitalisation ranking is explained in the piece on the largest cryptocurrencies. An individual coin page — the Tether page, for instance — shows the same thing for a single asset. These are facts about a market, not about admission or legal right.

Where this text will date first, and whom a purchase does not help

Regulation here is new and still being built out, so what has been said has known wear points.

• The retail investor cap is taken from a draft regulation. The act in force may name a different figure or a different method of aggregation.
• The mandatory intermediary requirement arrives for residents on 1 July 2027. Before that date and after it, the same question has different answers.
• The list of digital currencies is determined by the Bank of Russia, and there is no ground for treating its composition as fixed.
• Law No. 259-FZ is being replaced in stages by Law No. 282-FZ. Texts written before September 2026 describe the earlier regime.

And there are situations in which a lawful purchase does not line up with what the person actually needs.

• Money is needed by a known date in a known amount. The price is unbacked, and by the day in question it could be anything.
• The plan is to pay with it. Payment in digital currency for goods, work and services is prohibited, and a lawful way of buying does not change that.
• There will be no documents on costs. In that case there will be nothing with which to reduce the tax base by the purchase price.
• Deposit-like protection is expected. There is no insurance scheme for digital currency.
• A sum above the cap is needed and qualified investor status is absent. Under the draft Bank of Russia regulation, a retail investor's purchases with a single intermediary are limited to that cap.

The conclusion reduces to a list of checks: the intermediary is in the register, and status, list and cap have been verified against the version in force on the day of the transaction. Whether that list exhausts the requirements of the law is not something this text asserts. What happens to the price after that day is neither backed nor guaranteed by the law.