Russia Opens Bitcoin, Ether and USDT to Retail on November 17 — the 300,000-Ruble Cap Is Per Broker, Not Per Person

The Bank of Russia named the three assets that Russian non-qualified investors will be allowed to buy on 6 November, and the directive takes effect on 17 November. The list is Bitcoin, Ether and Tether's USDT, and nothing else. The same release carries the number that will shape the market more than the list does: no more than 300,000 rubles of purchases a year, through one intermediary.

What the directive actually does

From 17 November, exchanges are permitted to admit those three assets to public circulation. Retail buyers reach them through a broker, an asset manager or a crypto exchange service, on-exchange or over the counter. Qualified investors get any crypto asset a venue lists, with no purchase ceiling. Everyone, qualified or not, has to pass a test and read the risk disclosure before the first trade.

The selection criteria are written into the law: market capitalisation, average daily trading volume, and at least five years of pricing history on foreign venues. That is a high bar, and it is why the list is three assets long rather than three hundred. Anything with a shorter price history, or thinner books, stays out of reach of the retail account entirely.

The cap is per intermediary, and that changes the arithmetic

The central bank's wording attaches the limit to purchases through a single intermediary: 300,000 rubles a year per broker, per manager, per crypto exchange. Stack a broker, a manager and an exchange, and the same investor can legally put 900,000 rubles, about $10,980 at this weekend's rate, to work in a calendar year. Whether that reads as a loophole or as the design depends on how you read the text, but the text constrains the relationship, not the person.

At bitcoin's price near $75,884, one 300,000-ruble allowance buys roughly 0.048 BTC, and three allowances buy about 0.145 BTC. Selling is not capped. This is a purchase limit, not a holdings limit, which makes it a gate on the way in rather than a ceiling on the position.

What does not change: you still cannot pay with it

Domestic payments in crypto stay prohibited. Exporters and importers may use crypto in cross-border settlement without a limit, residents may move coins bought in Russia abroad only through regulated intermediaries, and holdings recorded abroad have to be reported. That is the asymmetry worth watching: capital can leave through a licensed pipe with no ceiling, while the retail account feeding that pipe is held to 300,000 rubles a year per intermediary.

17 November is the permission slip. 1 December is the venue

The directive legalises the listing. It does not switch on a market. Moscow Exchange has said it will start crypto trading on 1 December on its existing stock-market licence and infrastructure, and Sberbank became the first company on the central bank's register of digital depositories in October, running crypto trading inside Sberbank Online toward the same December target. The first live retail order is a December event, not a November one.

What to watch after the 17th: how quickly other brokers and exchanges join the register, whether the three-asset list widens in 2027, and what the first month of volume looks like against an allowance that resets per intermediary. The cap, not the list, is where the behaviour will show up.