russia says 50b rubles a day is moving in crypto, mostly off the radar

Russia’s deputy finance minister Ivan Chebeskov just put a number on something everyone kinda knew was happening.

he says russians are moving about 50 billion rubles worth of crypto every day. a lot of it is basically happening in unregulated spaces, outside proper oversight.

people keep converting it to like $600 to $650m a day, and “$130b+ a year”, but i’d treat the usd part as rough. the real point is scale. this is not some niche thing anymore.

context matters too. with sanctions and cross border rails getting tighter, crypto becomes the obvious grey pipe for moving value around.

and now the funny part, instead of banning it, regulators are trying to box it in. Bank of Russia has floated a framework where non qualified retail investors get a yearly cap (around 300k rubles), while qualified investors get way more room, but not for anonymous tokens.

also europe is clearly watching this. European Union is talking about going harder on russian linked crypto flows in the next sanctions round.

basically, the “underground” market is already huge. now governments are just trying to catch up, late as usual.