Russia’s largest bourse, the Moscow Exchange, has announced plans to list Bitcoin, Ether, and Tether’s USDT stablecoin starting December 1. The move is designed to domesticate the massive cryptocurrency trading volumes that Russian citizens currently execute on offshore platforms. The trades will mirror the exchange’s standard stock market hours and will be processed by the National Clearing Centre (NCC).

The launch presents a unique geopolitical and regulatory conflict. Both the Moscow Exchange and the NCC have been under U.S. Treasury sanctions since June 2024. However, Tether—the company behind the USDT stablecoin set to be listed—has a strict policy of freezing wallets linked to the U.S. sanctions list. It remains unclear how Tether’s compliance policies will interact with USDT held and cleared through the sanctioned Russian financial infrastructure.

Access to the new crypto market will come with strict guardrails. Everyday retail investors must pass an exam and will be capped at purchasing 300,000 rubles (roughly $3,700) of crypto per year through a single broker, though qualified investors will face no limits.

While banking executives project that trading under the new rules could reach 4 trillion rubles ($49 billion) in its first year, this equates to roughly 11 billion rubles a day. With Russia’s current crypto turnover estimated at 50 billion rubles daily, the majority of the country’s crypto flow is still expected to remain on offshore exchanges and peer-to-peer networks.