What happened
Russia's Federal Law No. 282-FZ, "On digital currencies and digital rights", came into force on 1 September 2026. The president signed it on 4 August 2026, after the State Duma passed it on 21 July and the Federation Council approved it on 24 July, as the official note accompanying the signature records. It is the country's first comprehensive statute for organised dealing in bitcoin and other digital currencies. The part most coverage skipped is the commencement article at the end: Article 56 holds three of the law's central provisions back until 1 July 2027.
What it changes
The law draws a perimeter and puts named firms inside it. Article 2 defines the circulation of digital currency narrowly: a transfer of coins between holders that either involves a participant in the national payment system, or pays the other side in money held at a credit institution, electronic money, digital roubles, securities in depo accounts, or coins recorded on a digital account. The statute regulates the seam where bitcoin meets the Russian financial system, not bitcoin itself.
Inside that perimeter, Articles 14 to 18 hand each job to one existing regulated category. Only a trading organiser may host trades. Only a broker may execute a client's order. Only a registered digital depositary may keep the records and grant access to the addresses where coins sit. Only a listed exchange organisation may deal on its own account, and Article 18 puts a number on when that starts: two or more transactions in a month totalling more than 3.5 million roubles.
Article 31 sets the retail conditions. A broker may buy coins for a resident who is not a qualified investor only if that person has passed the test in Article 32, has been shown a prescribed warning, stays inside an annual limit, and the asset is admitted to public trading on an organised venue. The limit itself is not in the statute. The text says it is the sum "established by the Bank of Russia", so the figure quoted in most reports is a decision of the central bank that can be changed without going back to Parliament.
What it does not change
Very little, for now. Article 56 defers Article 1 part 3 (only the licensed persons may organise circulation), Article 30 part 1 (residents may deal only through them or with them) and Article 21 (banks must refuse transfers to a payee suspected of organising circulation without the right) to 1 July 2027. A transitional clause is blunter: until 30 June 2027 residents may go on systematically buying and selling digital currency on their own account before appearing in any register. The perimeter is drawn; the gate closes in ten months.
Paying for things in bitcoin stays prohibited. Article 1 part 6 keeps the ban on accepting digital currency as payment for goods, work or services, and part 7 carves out only foreign trade contracts between residents and non-residents. A regulated market is not legal tender, and this law does not make it one.
Coins that never meet a rouble are largely outside the definition. Self-custody and moving coins between addresses you control are not circulation as Article 2 draws it, and Article 31 lists coins received from mining among the credits a depositary may accept without the retail conditions applying.
Context
The shape is familiar. MiCA attached authorisation to service providers rather than to the asset, for the plain reason that an issuerless coin has nobody to license. Russia has done the same thing and gone further, mapping each function onto a category of firm the securities law already knows how to supervise.
It is also the opposite move from El Salvador's, which spent five years making bitcoin a currency and then unwound the compulsory parts. Russia never tried that. Article 1 part 6 says what this law thinks bitcoin is: property that may be traded and must not be spent.