Russians are warming to crypto, encouraged by the country’s banks and regulators.

And they’re using cutting-edge solutions to build an investment ecosystem that can sidestep Western sanctions, past, present, or future.

For Moscow, the future of finance is digital — and it lives on a blockchain.

But while they’ve turned to traditional digital assets like Bitcoin, analysts expect a Russian take on tokenised securities and commodities, industrial Bitcoin mining, and crypto derivatives to take off in 2026.

Dawn of the DFA

Digital financial assets, Russia‘s take on the buzzy tokenisation trend also called DFAs, have grown by over a third to become a $13 billion market in 2025, the Russian central bank estimates.

But unlike many of the tokenised commodities traded in the West, they’re built on private blockchains and can only be traded on domestic platforms that hold central bank-issued permits. They now sit at the centre of Russia’s blockchain-powered economic expansion plans.

DFA issuers have released tokens tied to the value of everything from cocoa beans to St. Petersburg real estate.

The total volume of Russian DFA placements in the first nine months of 2025 increased by 33%, Vitaly Plotnikov, the deputy director of the central bank’s financial market infrastructure department, told Russian news agency Interfax in early December.

Yields on short-term DFAs this year exceeded short-term bond yields by an average of 1.7%, he added.

And it’s set to grow.

In early December, Anatoly Aksakov, the head of the State Duma’s commission on the financial markets and the chief architect of Russia’s crypto legislation, said boosting the DFA market will be a key economic priority for Moscow in 2026.

Aksakov added that the government aims to achieve tax parity for DFA investors in 2026, placing them on the same tax footing as traditional bondholders.

“This will allow the DFA market to grow significantly, attract money for longer periods, and accumulate resources for business and economic development,” Aksakov said.

Moscow has granted operating licences to 16 more Russian firms since Atomyze issued its first DFA, according to Russian central bank data.

While most of these license-holders are banks, in August, the bank also granted a DFA-issuing license to a startup named Madrigal, which offers DFA issuance-as-a-service products.

Crypto derivatives booming

The Moscow Exchange, or MOEX, and Russian banks are also championing so-called crypto derivatives.

As Russians cannot buy shares in popular US-based Bitcoin and Ethereum exchange-traded funds, or ETFs, MOEX and major banks have launched their own funds.

’The central bank has expressed a readiness to introduce new cryptocurrency regulations.‘

—  Anatoly Aksakov, the head of the State Duma’s commission on the financial markets

Those funds track the prices of popular BlackRock offerings, such as the iShares Bitcoin Trust ETF.

The popularity of these products has ballooned since they launched in the summer.

After breaking MOEX trading volume records in September, crypto futures trading volumes on MOEX reached $636 million, a new record for futures contracts, the Russian publication Tsargrad reported.

Crypto derivatives look set to grow rapidly in 2026. MOEX, the St. Petersburg Exchange and major banks — such as T-Bank, Alfa-Bank, and Sberbank — have all either launched their own crypto derivatives this year, or plan to do so in early 2026.

While the central bank has previously tried to ensure only super-rich, “super-qualified” investors can buy crypto-related products, the government wants to make them more accessible.

And the central bank is accommodating.

“The central bank has expressed a readiness to introduce new cryptocurrency regulations,” Aksakov said.

Major lenders are ready to take a step further and are waiting for permission to let their customers trade Bitcoin directly from their banking apps.

Mining moves

Bitcoin mining is another core crypto sector set to grow in Russia in 2026.

Dmitry Stupin, Vice President of the Russian Association of Cryptoindustry and Blockchain for Electricity Generation, told the Russian news agency TASS in November that mining volumes in Russia would recover to their 2024 peak of 2.1 to 2.2 GW in 2026 after dropping to around 1.7 GW in 2025.

Stupin said that as industrial miners start using their own gas-fired power generation and upgrade their rigs, miners are set to return to their 2024 highs.

The prediction does not seem far-fetched.

After all, electricity is relatively cheap in energy-abundant Russia, and the cooling costs required to prevent mining rigs from overheating are minimal in famously cold regions like Siberia.

Industrial mining was born in Southern Siberia in 2017, with the launch of the mining firm BitRiver. Since then, scores of competitors have emerged. In August 2024, President Vladimir Putin signed a law legalising industrial crypto mining.

This paved the way for institutional and private investors to enter industrial crypto mining.

In August, mining chiefs told the Russian media outlet RBC that it was only “a matter of time” before a major Russian mining company would seek a listing on MOEX.