Russian lawmakers propose making licensed crypto exchanges collect personal income tax on crypto trades

The State Duma’s Budget and Tax Committee has предложed that licensed crypto exchanges act as tax agents and withhold personal income tax on cryptocurrency purchase and sale transactions. For PSPs and exchange operators, the important bit is simple: this would move tax collection into the rails themselves, not leave it at the level of end-user self-reporting.

1. The committee wants to amend the government bill “On Digital Currency and Digital Rights”, which is now being prepared for its second reading. The proposed change would require licensed crypto exchanges to perform the tax agent function for transactions involving digital currency.
2. Under current law, only brokers, trust managers, and digital custodians can act as tax agents, and only when they are the source of income paid to an individual. The committee’s view is that crypto exchanges fit the same role because the bill groups them together as organizers of digital currency circulation.
3. That means organizations that buy, sell, or exchange cryptocurrency without a broker in the middle would also be brought into the tax-agent framework. In practice, that would put compliance and withholding obligations directly on exchange operators handling Russian users.
4. In May, the State Duma’s Financial Market Committee sent the Ministry of Finance a package of amendments to the same bill. One of those proposals would allow direct transactions between individuals, with a limit of 600,000 rubles per transaction.
5. The tax treatment of digital assets is also expected to be written into a new article of the Tax Code. It would govern personal income tax on the sale or exchange of digital currency, with the tax base calculated as the positive difference between income from digital-currency transactions and the relevant expenses.

For high-risk payment providers, the practical takeaway is that Russia is pushing crypto taxation closer to transaction infrastructure. If this proposal is adopted, exchange compliance stacks will need to handle withholding logic, not just trade execution and settlement.