Moscow is moving to tighten oversight of cryptocurrency owners, with the Central Bank of Russia (CBR) planning to require financial institutions to include their customers' coin holdings in official disclosure statements. These documents are issued for various purposes and often accompany the income and asset declarations filed by civil servants and government officials as a corruption-prevention measure.

Bank of Russia to Mandate Crypto Disclosures

The CBR wants information about cryptocurrencies to appear in the statements issued by commercial banks and financial firms. The documents concern clients' payment accounts and bank deposits and are typically requested when account holders need to report their balances to other organizations.

Under the proposal, the regulator would also list "digital financial assets," as defined by Russian law — for example, tokens issued on private blockchains and tokenized securities.

The plan is laid out in a draft recently published by the monetary authority in Moscow, quoted by the local crypto news outlets Bits.media and RBC Crypto this past Tuesday. It amends an existing CBR directive that defines the data to be included in statements commonly filed by civil servants when they report personal income and assets to the state. Russian lawmakers and their family members, as well as employees of the central bank and all state-owned corporations, are likewise obliged to submit these "anti-corruption" declarations. In practical terms, the amendment would place digital-asset holdings alongside bank balances in the same paperwork through which the Russian state already tracks officials' declared wealth.

If adopted as written, the directive will require financial institutions to disclose customers' current crypto holdings, income received from their sale, and proceeds from mining, starting from July 1, 2027. The start date leaves banks and other covered firms a transition window to fold digital-asset reporting into their compliance processes. And because the text is still a draft, its final version will determine the precise scope of what institutions must report.

The amendments proposed by the Bank of Russia are based on the new law "On Digital Currencies and Digital Rights," which took effect on September 1 of this year, as reported by Cryptopolitan. The legislation — passed by both houses of the Russian parliament in July and signed by President Putin in early August — represents the country's first attempt at comprehensive crypto regulation. It legalized key transactions with cryptocurrencies, such as investment, trading, and exchange into fiat money. While it does not ban Russians from owning coins, it prohibits their use in domestic payments. The disclosure proposal fits into the staged rollout the law establishes, in which general rules come first and government agencies flesh out the secondary regulations.

Russian Regulations Restrict Cryptocurrency Use

Under the new framework, companies and citizens can now buy and sell crypto, with purchases limited to less than $4,000 per year per intermediary for non-qualified investors. Transfers to non-custodial wallets are banned. Residents are permitted to send digital money abroad and spend it in cross-border settlements, apparently to circumvent the fiat restrictions imposed as part of Western sanctions over the war in Ukraine.

However, all transactions within the country's jurisdiction be processed by authorized trading platforms to be considered legal, and coins must be kept with state-approved digital depositories.

The Russian cryptocurrency market, valued at an estimated $44 billion in digital-asset holdings, will be regulated in stages: the enforced digital currency law establishes general rules while government agencies elaborate secondary regulations. Under this framework, the Central Bank of Russia is responsible for registering and licensing market participants, including developing compliance standards and qualification criteria for investors. The monetary policy regulator oversees the circulation of cryptocurrencies in the Russian economy, while the Federal Financial Monitoring Service (Rosfinmonitoring) identifies suspicious flows. The Federal Tax Service (FNS) is tasked with ensuring that crypto investors pay their taxes. The items banks would disclose — current holdings, income from sales, and mining proceeds — overlap with the figures relevant to the tax compliance the FNS is charged with ensuring.

Russian residents are obliged to report transactions involving addresses not administered by domestic depositories, and all transactions must be carried out exclusively through licensed intermediaries. Penalties for illegal turnover and other violations are to be determined by the summer of next year, leaving one of the regime's enforcement tools still to be defined.

The federal Russian government, along with the Ministry of Finance (Minfin) and other departments, is also closely involved in the regulatory process, as noted by RBC.

Despite legalizing crypto for the first time, Moscow is evidently limiting its use while pushing for broad adoption of its digital ruble, which was launched for public use at the start of September. Another media report this week suggested that Russia may follow China's example with the digital yuan and stimulate the use of its state-issued coin by offering discounts, bonuses, and even cashback to active users.