Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a law on August 4 that for the first time comprehensively regulates the circulation of digital currencies and digital rights in Russia, TASS reported, establishing licensing, custody and trading rules for the country's cryptocurrency market.

The signing caps a build-out that has been underway for months: the Central Bank and Finance Ministry began drafting the bill in February, the Duma passed a first reading in April, and adoption was pushed back to September after a wave of amendments. The delay reflected an effort to finalise rules on cross-border settlements and investor safeguards - the same period in which sanctions pressure has been pushing Russian banks to build out crypto payment rails of their own, Alfa Bank launched a crypto-based cross-border payment service in July aimed initially at CIS corridors such as Belarus and Kyrgyzstan.

Only entities on a special central bank registry will be permitted to run digital currency exchange activity - defined as two or more cryptocurrency trades in a single month worth more than RUB3.5mn ($43,712) - and they must meet a minimum equity requirement of RUB15mn ($187,339) and join a financial-market self-regulatory organisation (SRO); they can operate unregistered until July 1, 2027 while the registry itself is built out. Digital assets will be held by digital depositories, also supervised by the Central Bank of Russia (CBR), and banks will be required to block transfers they suspect are routed through an unlicensed exchange provider. The law separately enshrines judicial protection for digital currency holders' rights, regardless of whether the assets were previously declared.

The law keeps intact the existing ban on using cryptocurrency to pay for goods and services inside Russia, and bars advertising that suggests crypto can be used that way. Exceptions remain for foreign trade settlements between residents and non-residents, for cryptocurrency obtained through mining, for fees stipulated by an information system's own rules, and for transactions involving securities or other digital rights.

Retail investors without qualified status will be able to buy only the most liquid cryptocurrencies, capped at RUB300,000 ($3,700) a year per intermediary, after passing a suitability test; qualified investors face no such cap, and can also earn that status through their own crypto trading history. The core provisions take effect on September 1, 2026, with rules for non-resident digital depositories and money-transfer restrictions following in July 2027, technical requirements for digital financial asset issuance in September 2027, and a transitional period for existing exchange operators running to March 1, 2027.

The crypto-market law lands on the same date as a much bigger domestic project: September 1 is also when Russia's central bank digital currency, the digital ruble, is due to go live for ordinary payments. Twelve systemically important banks - including Sberbank, VTB, Alfa-Bank, Gazprombank and T-Bank - must let clients transact in digital rubles from that date, and retailers turning over more than RUB120mn a year must accept them; universal-licence banks and RUB30mn-plus retailers follow in September 2027, and everyone else in September 2028.

The CBR has been piloting the digital ruble with real money since August 2023, and by January 2025, 15 lenders including Sberbank, VTB and Alfa-Bank were running live tests, with a regional budget-operations pilot proposed in Chuvashia. Putin pushed the central bank to accelerate the rollout in a speech at the St Petersburg International Economic Forum last year, part of a strategy analysts say is aimed at loosening the grip of Western-controlled payment rails such as SWIFT over the Russian economy. Brussels has already moved to blunt the cross-border version of that strategy: the EU's 20th sanctions package, adopted in April, pre-emptively banned EU entities from transacting in digital rubles or ruble-linked tokens such as RUBx from May 24, 2026 - closing off the currency's use outside Russia before its domestic launch has even happened.

Public appetite has lagged the official timetable: a VTsIOM poll found most Russians do not understand why a third form of money is needed alongside cash and bank deposits, and a SuperJob survey found only around one in ten workers willing to take their full salary in digital rubles, prompting the CBR to start paying banks a small per-transaction fee to process salary payments through the new system.

That cross-border ambition also sits inside a wider project Moscow shares with its BRICS partners: a settlement system that lets members trade directly in national digital currencies rather than dollars. Some pieces of it are already functioning - India's Unified Payments Interface is live and interoperable with the UAE's Instant Payment Platform, and Russia has said roughly 90% of its trade with fellow BRICS members is already settled in national currencies rather than dollars - but the bloc has deliberately shelved the idea of a single shared BRICS currency in favour of linking existing central bank digital currencies, such as the digital rupee, digital yuan and digital ruble, through shared settlement cycles and central-bank swap lines rather than a single ledger or token.

A prototype of the resulting messaging system, BRICS Pay, was demonstrated in Moscow in October 2024, and Russian officials have floated folding it into a wider, basket-backed settlement instrument - reported elsewhere as "the Unit," said to be weighted around 40% physical gold and 60% a basket of member currencies - as a neutral unit of account for trade rather than a rival to the rouble or yuan themselves. How much of that is actually built rather than aspirational is genuinely disputed: independent analysts covering the project describe BRICS Pay as still in pilot and planning stages, with full deployment repeatedly pushed back even as individual bilateral corridors move ahead in the meantime.

Taken together, the crypto law, the digital ruble and the BRICS settlement push are three strands of the same project: rebuilding, piece by piece, the financial plumbing Russia lost when it was cut off from SWIFT and dollar clearing in 2022.