Four crypto exchanges have exited Russia since the start of October

On 29 October, KuCoin officially announced that it had stopped serving Russian clients, making it the fourth crypto exchange to effectively leave Russia in the past month. For high-risk payment and exchange operators, the detail that matters is not the headline number; it is that global platforms are tightening Russia exposure under broader regulatory pressure.

1. KuCoin did not give a reason for its exit. It joins Bitget, MEXC and HTX, which had already stopped working with Russian investors and explained the move as a need to comply with global regulatory requirements.
2. According to CoinMarket.Cap, MEXC, Bitget, KuCoin and HTX together accounted for about 17% of the turnover of the world’s largest exchanges in September. These were not niche venues on the margins of the market; they were global-scale players.
3. Their Russia business was material as well. TradingBeats data cited in the source shows that before the exits, Russian investors generated 13.7% of HTX’s trading turnover and 10.5% of MEXC’s turnover.
4. Experts cited in the source link the move to the EU’s 21st sanctions package, adopted in July. The package includes restrictions on interaction by European operators with crypto platforms that work with the Russian “contour,” which is the kind of compliance pressure that tends to travel well beyond Europe itself.
5. For Russian users, operations with bitcoin, ether and USDT are still available. The immediate hit is expected to fall on altcoin investors, where exchange access is more concentrated and substitutions are thinner on the ground.