U.S.-sanctioned Moscow Exchange will list bitcoin, ether and USDT on Dec. 1

Moscow Exchange is moving into spot crypto on Dec. 1, with bitcoin, ether and Tether’s USDT set to trade on the same screens Russians use for Sberbank and Gazprom shares. For high-risk payment and crypto operators, the important detail is not the headline asset list; it is that the trades will be cleared by the National Clearing Centre, which is also under U.S. sanctions.

1. The exchange said trading will run from 06:50 to 23:50 Moscow time, matching its stock market hours. The National Clearing Centre will clear the trades, with same-day or next-day settlement and swaps available for liquidity management.
2. Both Moscow Exchange and the National Clearing Centre were blocked by the U.S. Treasury in June 2024, which also issued wind-down licenses for dealings with them. That makes the launch structurally awkward for USDT, because Tether freezes wallets that appear on the Treasury’s sanctions list.
3. Retail access is not open-ended. Ordinary investors must pass a test and can buy no more than 300,000 rubles of crypto a year, about $3,700, through a single broker. Qualified investors face no cap.
4. Deputy Chairman Anatoly Popov told TASS in late August that trading under Russia’s new crypto rules could reach as much as 4 trillion rubles, or about $49 billion at current rates, in the first year. In February, Deputy Finance Minister Ivan Chebeskov put Russia’s crypto turnover at 50 billion rubles a day.
5. Sberbank’s first-year figure works out to about 11 billion rubles a day, which means most of the flow would still sit outside the exchange, on offshore venues and peer-to-peer desks. In other words, this is a regulated on-ramp, not a clean migration of Russian crypto activity into one venue.