Sanctioned Moscow Exchange Will List Bitcoin, Ether and USDT in December

Russia's biggest stock exchange is open for crypto business. The Moscow Exchange said Monday it will start listing bitcoin, ether and Tether's USDT on Dec. 1, putting digital assets on the same screens Russians use to trade Sberbank and Gazprom shares.

Trading runs 06:50 to 23:50 Moscow time, mirroring the exchange's stock market hours. The National Clearing Centre handles clearing, with same-day or next-day settlement plus swaps for managing liquidity. That makes it Russia's first major regulated venue where mainstream investors can buy crypto without leaving the domestic market.

There's a catch: both the exchange and its clearing house sit on the U.S. Treasury's sanctions list. Washington blocked them in June 2024 and handed out wind-down licenses for dealings with them. USDT adds another wrinkle — Tether freezes wallets that show up on Treasury's sanctions list, and CoinDesk says it has asked Tether how that policy applies to USDT held through the Moscow Exchange clearing house.

Retail investors face guardrails. They must pass a test, and can buy no more than 300,000 rubles worth of crypto a year — roughly $3,700 — through a single broker. Qualified investors get no cap at all.

The exchange is chasing serious volume. Deputy Chairman Anatoly Popov told TASS in late August that trading under Russia's new crypto rules could hit 4 trillion rubles, about $49 billion, in year one.

Reality may bite. Deputy Finance Minister Ivan Chebeskov put Russia's crypto turnover at 50 billion rubles a day back in February. Sberbank's first-year projection works out to roughly 11 billion rubles a day, leaving most flow on offshore exchanges and peer-to-peer desks.