Russians have a little over eight months left to trade Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies directly with one another. The Bank of Russia confirmed this week that from July 1, 2027, peer-to-peer deals—in which two people swap rubles for coins without a regulated middleman—will no longer be legal.

The clarification appears in updated guidance the regulator posted on its official website on October 12. Published as a frequently asked questions section on cryptocurrency operations, the guidance spells out what residents can and cannot do under the new regime, and confirms that direct crypto trades between individuals remain legal only until that deadline.

The legal basis is Federal Law No. 282-FZ, "On Digital Currencies and Digital Rights," which President Vladimir Putin signed on August 4 and which took effect on September 1. Article 30 lists the crypto operations residents may carry out without a licensed intermediary, and from July 2027 that list no longer includes trades between individuals. The gap between the law taking effect and the P2P cutoff leaves a transition runway in which the old, direct trading model stays legal while the licensed system is being built around it.

From that date onward, residents may only trade crypto through, or directly with, companies that "organize the circulation" of digital currencies—mainly brokers licensed by the Bank of Russia and crypto exchange organizations listed in its registry. In practice, that will channel all retail trading through supervised Russian entities.

The guidance also imposes restrictions beyond peer-to-peer trades. Individuals cannot move crypto from a digital account to their own non-custodial wallet, meaning a wallet where the owner holds the private keys instead of a company. Transfers from one person to another through addresses run by a digital depository—a licensed firm that records who owns which coins—are also barred, even to settle a trade between them. Lending crypto is likewise off-limits for ordinary users: only brokers, trustees, exchange organizations, and clearing houses can act as the lender in a crypto loan. Taken together, the rules give ordinary users a tightly bounded set of permitted actions, with a licensed firm at the center of nearly every one.

The changes strike at the most common route Russians have used to acquire stablecoins. Since Binance sold its Russian business to CommEX in 2023, the standard method has been peer to peer: the buyer wires rubles to a seller's bank card and receives USDT, a dollar-pegged token, in return. That model is exactly what the new rules end.

From July 1, 2027, Russian banks will have to refuse clients who try to fund crypto wallets on foreign platforms and will not be able to accept rubles cashed out from those platforms, Andrei Tugarin, managing partner at GMT Legal, told Kommersant FM.

Access will also be tiered by investor status. Non-qualified investors—people without professional investor status—must pass a test and can buy up to 300,000 rubles (about $3,600) of crypto a year, while qualified investors face no cap. Bitcoin, Ethereum, and USDT are the only coins on the central bank's list available to non-qualified buyers, a combination of testing, annual caps, and a three-coin list that keeps retail participation in the licensed market tightly limited.

The registered intermediaries are already taking shape. Sberbank, Russia's largest lender, joined the central bank's register of crypto exchange organizations on October 12 and plans to launch its first crypto products on December 1, per Interfax—the nearest-term milestone to watch as the licensed market takes shape. VTB and T-Invest Lab are also on the register. To qualify, crypto exchange organizations must be Russian companies with at least 15 million rubles (about $179,000) in equity and be listed in the central bank's registry, though they can keep operating without registration until July 1, 2027—meaning the register's final composition by that date will determine which firms can legally serve Russian traders.

Domestic payments in crypto remain prohibited. The law in place the ban on paying for goods and services with digital assets while allowing crypto in foreign trade settlements—a carve-out that Kaplan Panesh, deputy chair of the Duma's budget committee, openly described as a way of circumventing sanctions when the bill cleared its first reading in April.