The register entry lets Sberbank buy and sell digital currencies with its own funds outside organized trading, with bitcoin, ether and tether in app testing and the final coin list still unpublished. US blocking sanctions imposed in 2022 reach those transactions too.
The Bank of Russia has added Sberbank to its register of organizations authorized to exchange digital currencies, clearing the country's largest lender to trade crypto for customers from December 1. Interfax reported the entry on October 12 citing the regulator's website, in accounts carried by crypto.news and FinanceFeeds; TokenPost reported the listing a day later. Sberbank joined the separate digital depository register less than a week earlier, so it now holds both registrations.
The exchange register is narrower than the word suggests. Under the central bank's October 6 statement, a registered exchange operator may buy and sell digital currencies in its own name and with its own funds, outside organized trading, rather than matching customer orders on a venue. The depository registration is the one that lets the bank record and transfer digital currencies and the digital rights attached to them, and Sberbank has said it will manage the wallets used for customer deposits, withdrawals and transfers.
Sberbank has tested buying, selling, depositing and withdrawing bitcoin, ether and tether inside its main banking app, and plans to offer its first products through SberBank Online, SberInvestments and SberBusiness. The final list of permitted coins is the central bank's to set and has not been published, so the three assets in testing are not a confirmed line-up.
Access depends on investor status. The framework took effect on September 1, after the law was signed in August, and requires mandatory testing. Non-qualified investors may buy up to 300,000 rubles, about 3,500 dollars, of eligible cryptocurrency a year through each intermediary. Qualified investors sit the same test with no annual ceiling. Paying for ordinary domestic goods and services in crypto stays prohibited, while cross-border settlement carries no amount limit.
The register itself is new and small, and the reports do not agree on its size. The first lists were published on October 7. FinanceFeeds counted nine firms on the exchange register including Sberbank, VTB and T-Invest Lab, with five on the depository register and VTB the only other firm on both. TokenPost, writing a day later, counted ten exchange operators and six custody institutions. The gap is consistent with entries being added between the two observations, and neither count was checked against the register directly for this report. From July 2027 transactions must run through registered intermediaries, and firms admitted under transitional provisions have until September 1, 2027 to meet the remaining requirements.
What the registration does not change is Sberbank's standing outside Russia. The US Treasury imposed full blocking sanctions on the bank on April 6, 2022 under Executive Order 14024, designating 42 subsidiaries alongside it and blocking any entity it owns 50 percent or more of, whether or not that entity has been named. OFAC guidance applies those obligations to transactions in crypto as well as in conventional currency. The registration is a domestic permission, and it leaves a US person as barred from dealing with Sberbank's crypto desk as with its lending. Tether balances held through the bank sit inside the same perimeter, a risk crypto.news flags in its account.
Sberbank's own expectation for the market it is about to enter was set out last month, when deputy chairman Anatoly Popov put legal crypto trading at about 46 billion dollars in the first year and called that conservative, on the reasoning that most Russian crypto flow will keep bypassing licensed venues. Nothing in the register entry tests that forecast. It only gives the bank the standing to find out.
The bank also intends to accept bitcoin, ether and tether as loan collateral, which needs a separate permission it does not yet hold, and it completed a bitcoin-backed loan pilot with Intelion Data in December 2025. Lenders taking crypto as security keep meeting the same enforcement problem from the other direction: Jeonbuk Bank in South Korea lent against pledged bitcoin it cannot seize directly on a default and must get a court-ordered sale instead. On the custody side, Standard Chartered's Singapore entity said this month that it would hold cryptoassets for institutional clients without naming a license, a regulator or a launch date.
Alexander Vedyakhin, Sberbank's first deputy chairman, said in July that the bank would have the infrastructure and the digital depository running by December 1. That date is about seven weeks away. The coins customers will be allowed to buy are still the central bank's decision to publish.
