Bank of Russia Registers First Nine Operators for Bitcoin (BTC) Trading and Custody

Nine Firms Enter the First Registry

The Bank of Russia has registered the country's first nine legal providers of digital asset services, clearing four exchange operators and five custodial platforms under a framework that took effect on September 1, 2026. The registrations, announced on Tuesday, are the first entries ever made in the regulator's two official registries: one for organizations that broker the exchange of digital currencies and one for so-called digital depositories that safeguard assets. The step is administrative rather than a reaction to Bitcoin price conditions, but it places Bitcoin (BTC) and other digital assets on a supervised footing inside Russia for the first time.

Sberbank, the country's largest lender, and VTB, its second-biggest bank, both majority state-owned, lead the custody list alongside the tokenization platform Atomyze, blockchain developer Voltari and a firm named Cloud Infrastructure. VTB also appears on the exchange registry, together with T-Invest Lab, a subsidiary of T-Bank, plus Zefir and Sistema-crypto. The central bank's official press release states that these participants gained market access under the transitional provisions of the Law on Digital Currencies and Digital Rights, legislation that passed both houses of parliament in July and was signed by President Vladimir Putin in early August before entering into full force at the start of September. That law legalized investment, storage and trading in digital assets. The first applications were submitted on October 5, the same day the regulator began accepting them. From the date of registration, the platforms must follow Russian rules for processing and recording digital asset transactions.

Licensed Intermediaries and Custody Rules

Under the new law, every digital asset transaction, including transfers to a crypto wallet address hosted abroad, must run through intermediaries licensed in Russia, a category that covers banks, brokers and exchanges. The regulator has clarified that registered exchanges may buy and sell digital currencies in their own name and at their own expense outside organized trading venues, a model closer to a principal trading desk than to a brokered venue. Digital depositories, a category created by the statute, are responsible for safekeeping and transferring digital assets and other instruments, and for providing clients access to asset addresses.

The compliance clock is explicit: registered platforms must bring all operations into line with the full framework by September 1, 2027 at the latest. That deadline gives the central bank roughly eleven months to observe how the new registries behave in practice. With every transfer routed through supervised intermediaries, services such as crypto mixers sit outside the compliant perimeter by design. The central bank described the first registrations as a significant step toward building regulated infrastructure for the Russian digital currency market.

The licensing path is deliberately friendlier to incumbents. Banks and stock exchanges already active in traditional finance face a significantly simplified procedure, while crypto-native firms may apply under the standard process. Both Sber and VTB, like Atomyze, are already on Western sanctions lists, which shapes who can actually operate these rails. The regulator spent years resisting legalization, a hard line that kept the domestic sector wrapped in regulatory FUD, and it has softened its position over the past two years as fiat restrictions imposed after the invasion of Ukraine cut off conventional channels.

Sanctioned Banks at the Core

Our reading of the registry is straightforward: Russia's legal crypto flow now concentrates in institutions that are already sanctioned, so domestic Bitcoin (BTC) trading will clear inside a closed, ruble-based circuit rather than tapping global dollar settlement. The September 1, 2027 deadline doubles as a probation period, letting the Bank of Russia strip or expand permissions depending on how the first nine firms perform. The regulator is also pursuing a separate central bank digital currency project, the digital ruble, which puts a CBDC track and regulated crypto rails on parallel paths. For markets outside Russia the impact stays modest for now: nine registrations create capacity, not demand, and cross-border access remains blocked by sanctions.