Russian crypto exchanges may struggle to meet central bank speed rules, experts say

The Bank of Russia has clarified that crypto exchange settlements with clients must happen at the same time as the trade is executed, or immediately after it. For high-risk PSPs, the practical issue is not the rule itself but the infrastructure required to make it work without the exchange holding client funds while it hunts for liquidity.

1. The regulator’s logic is straightforward: customer money should not sit with the exchange while it searches the market for the needed asset or assembles liquidity. On paper, that looks closer to equities or bond trading; in practice, experts cited by Kommersant say it only works if the entire market stack moves together.
2. That stack includes the crypto exchange, a digital bank, and a depository. For smaller exchanges, building those links from scratch is the problem. Alexander Peresichan, CEO of Technobit, said such players do not currently have access to ready-made infrastructure, so setup and internal buildout costs will be materially higher than for banks.
3. Alexander Kretov, head of blockchain technology development at T-Bank, said the first bottlenecks will be technological, especially information security and building reliable infrastructure. The experts quoted by the newspaper expect the number of exchanges to start shrinking as a result.
4. The institutions best placed to comply are large financial ecosystems, especially banks. According to the Bank of Russia register, VTB, Sber, and T-Technologies have already received permission to operate both as crypto exchanges and digital depositories.
5. The same register also includes IT groups such as WEB3.0 and Cloud Infrastructure. The point, as Kommersant notes, is that these players already have the technological and organizational base needed for the integrated setup the central bank wants.

One day earlier, the Bank of Russia published clarifications for digital depositories and crypto exchanges. Among other things, it said client settlements must be carried out simultaneously with trade execution or immediately afterward, and that delaying execution until the end of the operating day is prohibited.