Russia To Permit Retail Crypto Purchases Under New Rules

Market snapshot: Bitcoin near $70,700 as policy headlines mix

Total crypto market capitalization was about $2.47 trillion and bitcoin dominance was roughly 57.1%. Odds of bitcoin’s price remaining under $75,000 by the end of February are now at 66% on the prediction markets.

Will Bitcoin stay under $75K by end of February? Live

66% chance

Yes

No

Data showed bitcoin around $70,856 on Feb. 8, with 24-hour trading volume around $16.18 billion.

Russia’s retail cap and the push to legalize crypto investing

In a Dec. 23 statement, the Bank of Russia said non-qualified investors would face a knowledge test and a hard cap of “не более 300 тыс. рублей в год через одного посредника” (no more than 300,000 rubles per year through a single intermediary).

The concept would allow both qualified and non-qualified investors to acquire crypto assets, but it sets different guardrails. Non-qualified investors would be limited to the most liquid cryptocurrencies, with eligibility criteria to be defined in legislation, while qualified investors would be able to buy any cryptocurrencies except “anonymous” assets, the central bank said. It also said crypto operations could run through existing market infrastructure, exchanges, brokers, and trust managers operating under current licenses, while adding special requirements for crypto-facing depositaries and exchange services.

The Bank of Russia also said residents would be able to buy cryptocurrency abroad using foreign accounts and transfer previously purchased cryptocurrency abroad through Russian intermediaries, but would need to notify the tax service about those operations. Details on how reporting would be implemented, and which intermediaries would be authorized to support crypto transfers, were not disclosed in the summary.

Russia’s approach stands out because it is not a ban-and-enforce model. It is closer to building a regulated funnel for access, even while the central bank warned crypto is high risk and subject to volatility and sanctions-related risks. That is a different posture from the prohibition-first framework Beijing reiterated this week, which we detailed in China Declares a Full-Scale Crackdown on Cryptocurrencies.

White House crypto talks return Feb. 10 as the CLARITY Act debate continues

The policy split is widening globally at the same moment the U.S. is still negotiating the plumbing of its own framework. Crypto In America reported the White House scheduled a second staff-level meeting Tuesday afternoon, Feb. 10, with banking and crypto representatives focused on stablecoin yield, one of the sticking points now spilling into market-structure drafting.

The meeting follows an earlier White House session that ended without a public compromise on whether stablecoins or platforms should be able to pass “yield” or “rewards” to users. Banking trade groups said legislation should “protect the safety and soundness of our financial system,” while crypto advocates argued the yield dispute is now a bottleneck for the broader package, according to a joint banking statement and the Blockchain Association’s readout.

That stablecoin fight matters because it can change who benefits from the economics of “digital dollars.” The GENIUS Act already bars issuer-paid yield for simply holding payment stablecoins, and the market has been routing yield into wrappers and rewards programs instead, a setup we unpacked in The Genius Act and the Stablecoin Market.

The market-structure bill still in play is the CLARITY Act, H.R. 3633, which would try to define when a token is treated closer to a commodity-style digital asset versus a security and how oversight is split between agencies. For the timeline and what it would change, see our coverage of the CLARITY Act: H.R. 3633 and the crypto market structure fight.

SEC Chair Paul Atkins has also urged lawmakers to lock in a clearer SEC-CFTC split, framing “clarity” as a prerequisite for scaling regulated crypto markets in the U.S., according to a Jan. 12 post.

For Russia, the restrained takeaway is that legal access expands the surface area of adoption even when the underlying technology is permissionless. A regulated on-ramp matters for the people who will not self-custody or wire funds to offshore venues, and it can reduce compliance friction for institutions that need licensed intermediaries, audited processes, and predictable rules.

What is still unknown is how lawmakers will define “most liquid” cryptocurrencies, what the retail knowledge test will look like in practice, and how quickly intermediaries can operationalize the new licensing and reporting expectations. The Bank of Russia said it is targeting a legislative base by July 1, 2026, with penalties for illegal intermediaries planned from July 1, 2027, while Washington’s next catalyst is procedural: what comes out of the Feb. 10 White House meeting and whether it clears a path for U.S. market-structure language. For a broader map of how the SEC, CFTC, stablecoins, and tax rules intersect, see our guide to US Crypto Regulation 2026.