Finam plans to enter Russia’s cryptocurrency market as broker and crypto exchange

Russian financial group Finam says it wants to be one of the players in the country’s newly regulated crypto market. For payment companies and high-risk PSPs, the useful bit is simple: Russia is moving from grey-zone crypto activity toward a formal market structure, and Finam is already naming the roles it wants to play.

1. Finam president and board chairman Vladislav Kochetkov told TASS that the group plans to join the Russian cryptocurrency market “as one of the leading players.” He said the strategy is split into two parts: what has already been decided and what is still being worked out.
2. What is definite, according to Kochetkov, is that Finam will operate as both a broker and a crypto exchange. That places the group directly in the execution layer of the market, rather than as a passive investor waiting to see where regulation lands.
3. Finam has not decided whether to build its own digital depository. Kochetkov called it “an expensive undertaking,” saying such a facility would be needed for official record-keeping and secure custody of digital currencies.
4. He said creating a digital depository would require at least 3 billion rubles in investment, with payback starting from eight years. For a project with that much capital locked up for that long, he said the group needs strong confidence in future market volume, and at the start of regulation that confidence is still lower than it would like.
5. Russia’s organized crypto market is supposed to start operating after the law takes effect on 1 September. In parallel, major banks are already preparing crypto-service rollout algorithms, Alfa-Bank has announced test crypto trading and plans for a digital depository, and many of the market rules will be set out in separate instructions from the Bank of Russia.

The Bank of Russia is also building the rulebook around digital depositories, including capital requirements. In August 2026, the central bank completed collection of feedback on the draft instruction governing trading on the organized crypto and digital financial assets market, and published drafts that set minimum capital for a digital depository at 50 million to 250 million rubles. That is the part high-risk operators should watch closely: the market may be opening, but entry costs and compliance obligations are already being written into the plumbing.