Moscow Exchange to Trade USDT, Bitcoin and Ether From December 1

Bitcoin, Ether and USDT on Domestic Screens

Russia's largest stock exchange is moving the country's crypto market onshore. Moscow Exchange will open trading in bitcoin (BTC), ether (ETH) and Tether's USDT on Dec. 1, per the operator's official announcement published on Monday, Nov. 2. The session runs from 06:50 to 23:50 Moscow time, the same window as the equity market, which places the three assets on the screens Russians already use for Sberbank and Gazprom shares. The National Clearing Centre, the group's in-house clearing unit, settles trades on a same-day or next-day basis, with swap instruments available for liquidity management, so the venue operates as a regulated crypto exchange under Russian rules rather than a crypto desk bolted onto a brokerage. Access is tiered. Ordinary investors must pass a test before they can buy, and annual purchases are capped at 300,000 rubles, roughly $3,700, through a single broker. Qualified investors, a category defined under Russian securities rules, face no cap. The test screens for knowledge of digital asset risks under the country's new crypto framework, and the cap is meant to shield smaller households, but it also limits the mass-market share the listing can capture, leaving demand above the threshold where it sits today, on offshore venues and peer-to-peer desks. USDT, the dollar token at the centre of the launch, is issued by Tether and ranks as the largest of the dollar-backed stablecoins by market value. The token holds a one-to-one dollar peg and settles on public blockchains, which is what makes it usable outside the banking system. The operator disclosed the hours and settlement cycle in its notice; fee schedules were not part of the announcement. The listing targets crypto activity Russians currently conduct abroad, and the dollar-pegged instrument is what that offshore market actually trades.

Sanctions and the Tether Question

Sanctions run through every part of the plan. The U.S. Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control placed Moscow Exchange and the National Clearing Centre under sanctions in June 2024 and issued wind-down licenses that same month, documents that let counterparties close out existing business for a limited period without lifting the designations themselves. The licenses do not authorize new long-term business with either entity, and both stay blocked. That matters for the token the exchange chose to list: Tether, the issuer of USDT, freezes wallets that appear on the Treasury's sanctions list, and a freeze leaves tokens unmovable at the token layer even though the balances stay visible on the ledger. Tether has not said publicly how that policy would apply to USDT held through the sanctioned clearing house, and the operator's notice is silent on the question. The freeze mechanism is not hypothetical: the issuer has blacklisted addresses tied to designated persons before. Qualified investors, who can buy without limits, are the cohort whose larger positions would test that policy first. The volume case rests on two officials' estimates. Anatoly Popov, the exchange's deputy chairman, said in late August that trading under the new rules could climb to 4 trillion rubles, about $49 billion at current rates, in year one, in comments to TASS. Deputy Finance Minister Ivan Chebeskov had put the country's existing crypto turnover at 50 billion rubles per day in February, while the first-year projection works out to roughly 11 billion rubles a day. On those figures the onshore venue would absorb only a fraction of current activity, which is why most volume is expected to keep clearing offshore, the gap the December 1 launch schedule aims to close. Popov's remark came months before the listing notice, and the operator has not updated the projection since.

Freeze Risk and the Retail Cap

For the 4 trillion ruble projection to materialize onshore, two constraints have to hold. The first is Tether's freeze policy: any designation touching balances parked with the NCC would strand the very tokens retail buyers are being invited to purchase, and that risk alone is enough to feed FUD among the users the exchange wants back. The issuer's balance sheet is not the bottleneck: its Q3 attestation showed excess reserves doubled to $7.95 billion. The second constraint is the retail cap: at 300,000 rubles a year, the mass market stays small, so the venue is effectively competing for qualified investors who already trade offshore. Where that liquidity sits is visible in venue reserves: our October snapshot showed Binance's USDT reserves falling 7.95% to 29.48 billion tokens. Until the freeze question is answered, the December listing formalizes access without guaranteeing the dollar token behind it stays usable.