Deputy chairman Anatoly Popov called the forecast conservative, because most Russian crypto flow will keep bypassing licensed venues and professional participants have until July 2027 to get authorised.
Sberbank expects Russians to trade about 4 trillion roubles of cryptocurrency, roughly $46 billion, during the first year of the country's new digital asset rules.
The figure comes from Anatoly Popov, a deputy chairman of the bank, who told the state news agency TASS that volumes should climb to around 7.5 trillion roubles, about $87 billion, by 2029. Russia's framework took effect on 1 September, four weeks after Vladimir Putin signed legislation covering crypto trading, custody and cross-border payments. The domestic ban on paying for goods and services in crypto stays in place.
Popov described his own projection as conservative, which is an unusual thing for a banker to say about a number that large. His reasoning is that a substantial share of Russian crypto flow will carry on moving through exchange services that sit outside formal exchange trading, and that the market cannot mature inside twelve months when professional participants have until 1 July 2027 to obtain licences. In other words, the $46 billion is what Sberbank thinks the regulated venue will capture while the grey market carries on regardless.
The tradable universe is narrow. The Bank of Russia published a draft list of assets eligible for public trading, screened on market capitalisation, trading volume and a minimum five-year price history. Three made the cut: bitcoin, ether and Tether's USDT. Everything else, including most of the top twenty by market value, was left off.
That list is what makes Popov's second announcement interesting. Sberbank already runs crypto-backed lending against bitcoin, having piloted the product with the mining firm Intelion in December 2025, and it now wants to widen the collateral. "We plan to accept not only Bitcoin but also Ethereum and the stablecoin Tether as collateral," Popov told TASS, adding that this would follow only "after the Central Bank, of course, allows them for public circulation."
The lending demand is real and the arithmetic behind it is not complicated. Russia's key interest rate stands at 14 per cent, which makes ordinary credit expensive. A miner who sells coins to cover electricity and hardware gives up any subsequent appreciation; a miner who pledges them keeps the exposure and pays interest instead. In a high-rate economy with a captive base of domestic miners, a bitcoin-backed loan book is one of the few genuinely attractive products a Russian bank can write against a volatile asset.
What Sberbank has not disclosed is everything that would let anyone judge the offer: no loan-to-value ratios, no interest rates, no launch date. All of it waits on approvals the central bank has not granted. Strip out the collateral plans and the forecast, and what remains is a sanctioned lender briefing state media about products it cannot yet sell.
That word matters more than the rest of the announcement. Sberbank and 42 of its subsidiaries were added to the US Treasury's Specially Designated Nationals list in April 2022 and remain under full blocking sanctions, which means US persons are barred from dealing with them directly or indirectly and non-US firms carry secondary sanctions risk for providing material support. Russia's regulated crypto market is therefore being built by institutions that the dollar system will not touch, around an asset list whose most useful member is a dollar stablecoin.
USDT is where that contradiction bites hardest. Tether has frozen wallets at the request of US law enforcement on numerous occasions and publishes those freezes; a token that can be immobilised by its issuer is a strange thing to hold as collateral against a loan from an entity Washington has already blocked. Sberbank has not said how it would treat a frozen position, and nothing in the Bank of Russia's draft list addresses the question.
Russia has spent four years discovering the limits of routing around the dollar. Binance handed Russian authorities the KYC file that helped jail a Ukraine donor in August, a reminder that offshore venues serving Russian users answer to more than one master. The EU's sanctions sweep cut HTX and ten other platforms off from Binance transfers, and the US has since made it possible to sanction any firm servicing Iran's crypto sector — a template that transfers to Russia without much modification.
Sberbank is not wrong that demand exists. Russians have traded crypto in size for years through peer-to-peer desks, Telegram brokers and exchanges that quietly tolerate rouble deposits, and a licensed domestic venue with a state bank attached will pull some of that onshore. Whether it pulls 4 trillion roubles of it depends on whether Russian traders prefer a regulated market that reports them to a grey one that does not.
Professional participants have until 1 July 2027 to get licensed.
