The Russian Crypto Ecosystem

Published in

Hype

20 min readSep 15, 2021

From a regulatory stance, Russia has a storied past with crypto. But, the developer talent that continues to pour out of the country, along with the abundant (cold) space, means that this region remains a major player in crypto. On top of Russian developers and founders in almost every major project, Triple A also estimated that Russia has the second highest percentage of crypto ownership, 11.9%.

But, while the country has a growing ecosystem, the regulatory stance still presents some complexity. We’ve collected a summary of the most important aspects of the market to guide founders through this market.

The Crypto Market in Russia — Russia has a flourishing crypto market, which was spurred by massive fundraising during the 2017 ICO boom.
Crypto Trading & Activities — Boasting the second highest rate of crypto ownership and trading volume globally, Russia is one of the most important regions.
Legislation— In 2021, the Digital Financial Assets Law went into effect, limiting the use of crypto and advertising. And, a further tax law is expected to be passed.
Mining Activities — Despite legal limitations, several farms have secured agreements to buy energy at wholesale prices, driving Russia’s consistent competition for providing the third highest amount of bitcoin’s hash rate.
Top Exchanges — Russian investors have a high demand for anonymity, leading to large peer-to-peer and cash-to-crypto markets, although there are several popular exchanges.
Funding & Top Projects — Crypto and blockchain funding are difficult to secure in Russia, but there are a few VC funding blockchain projects, and many of the top crypto projects have Russian founders or developers.
DeFi Ecosystem — Many top DeFi projects have Russians in their core teams, but are registered outside of the borders. Sberbank, Russia’s largest bank, is also attempting to move into the space with Sbercoin, but must wait for the approval of the Central Bank.
NFT Ecosystem — Russia has many NFT artists and innovative projects and collaborations, along with ties to some of the largest NFT marketplaces.
Communication Channels & Influencers — Russian media is generally aimed at the entire Russian-speaking market, but there is also a trend of Russians moving into English internet spheres, inline with the move outside the borders to access a larger market and funding.
Blockchain in Academia — Russian universities offer a fair number of blockchain related degrees, consistent with the large number of blockchain developers the nation produces.
What’s on the Horizon? — Recent legislation puts a strain on some crypto activity, partially driven by imminent testing of a digital ruble, but, can’t fully outweigh Russia’s strong user base and talent.

The Crypto Market

Crypto is booming in Russia, with some studies finding that it outranks gold and stocks as an investment asset, coming in fifth place. However, this was not always the case.

While the Soviet Union is a relic of the past, this history is often cited as coming into play in the crypto ecosystem. The centralised systems produced some of the top technologists in the world — the Cold War leading to an intense investment in technology and innovation from both the US and the USSR. The dissolution of the USSR led to an abundance of skilled workers, but a shortage of jobs and funding. And, now, with the large number of blockchain developers Russia is producing, but limited access to funding, the links to this time are fairly clear to many.

In fact, the ICO boom of 2017 was particularly strong in Russia, as it finally opened up clear pathways to global funding.

During the time, Moscow outranked Silicon Valley for Founders and CEOs of projects.

While this boom was not long-lived, it definitely served to spur the Russian market, bringing a great number of new projects (both legitimate and not) and interest to the space. This was also around the time that President Vladimir Putin revised his strict stance against crypto. The funding that flooded the market also served as the impetus for large scale mining operations in the country, as the rewards — and computing power — both rapidly increased with the price of bitcoin.

Trading & Activities

There is a high level of grassroots adoption, with an estimated 11.91% of the population holding crypto — the second highest percentage globally.

For bitcoin trading volume, this nation also came in second, only behind the US in 2020.

This is paired with growth for peer-to-peer services and heavy usage of crypto-to-cash services. While Bitcoin ATMs — which enable users to bypass many KYC and AML checks for more anonymous transactions — make up some of these transactions, there is actually a much larger underground market for this. Notably, Hydra Market offers many methods to cash out anonymously, from prepaid debit cards to online transfers to literal buried cash. While this may sound laughably complex, Hydra Market received $1.4 B in bitcoin payments in 2020. This is even more impressive when noting that they only target the Russian-speaking market.

However, even with a large amount of grassroots adoption, the entire market has been limited by legal uncertainty — driving many companies to register outside of the Federation’s borders. More recently, the Rosfinmonitoring, Russia’s financial regulator, awarded a contract of 14.7M rubles (~170,230 euros) to a major information technology company, RCO, to build software that will track and profile crypto users. While this technology is likely years out, it marks an unsettling and unprecedented turn of events for Russian crypto users. The Rosfinmonitorising claims this is an attempt to limit money laundering and terrorist financing. And, to be fair, there have been a number of high-profile cyber scams linked to both crypto and Russia, but all the same, this proposed software will track all users.

Legislation

After taking a hard approach against crypto that even included a proposal in 2016 to jail holders of “money surrogates”, which included cryptos — luckily never passed — President Vladimir Putin revised his stance and even met with Ethereum Co-Founder, Vitalik Buterin. Following this shift in stance, Putin called for legislation to formalise crypto in the country. This led to a long debate starting in 2018. In 2020, the Digital Financial Assets Law (Federal Law No 259-FZ) was finally passed.

This law formalises digital assets, or as they are commonly referred to in Russian law “digital rights”, and while more restrictive than some regions, provides some opportunities as well.

The law went into effect January 2021, and defined digital financial assets as digital rights that include:

Monetary claims
The ability to exercise rights attached to issuable securities
Interest in the capital of a non-public joint stock company
The right to transfer issuable securities.

Judicial protections are only provided if digital currency possessions were declared in accordance with tax law. Further, this law prohibits:

Distributing information about possible settlements in digital currencies (or advertising)
Offering and accepting digital currencies as payment for goods, work, and services
Using any method of payment in digital currencies (as this threatens the sovereign currency).

There are also some restrictions on exchange operations in Russia, as well as more intense reporting requirements. Furthermore, the Central Bank of Russia recently prohibited civil servants from owning crypto (following a spate of money laundering claims) and non-qualified investors from buying more than 600,000 rubles (~7000 euros) worth of digital assets.

However, as mentioned above, the law also proffered some opportunities to the sector, including the chance to ‘establish a “digital” non-public joint stock company with digitalised corporate governance, transfer/acquisition rights attached to traditional shares, including dividend rights and voting rights, without selling/acquiring the shares themselves’.

This sets the basis for tokenisation of assets under a legal framework.

The actual application of the law for this purpose has not yet been tested, though, and the Central Bank’s directives indicate that they are not fully friendly to such uses.

The efforts to provide a full legal framework are not concluded yet, with more proposed legislation regarding taxation. The impending legislation (Bill №1065710–7, Art. 38, § 2) is expected to go into force on 30 April, 2022, and will require far greater reporting requirements for crypto holders. Residents, citizens, registered legal and corporate entities, registered representatives of foreign companies, and international institutions operating in the Russian Federation must inform authorities of digital currency possession rights, digital currency transactions, and digital currency balances if they handle more than 600,000 rubles (~7000 euros) worth of crypto in a calendar year. Failing to do so accurately will constitute a tax offence, and incur a fee of 10% of the value. In addition to stringent self-reporting, as mentioned before, Rosfinmonitoring, the Russian agency for preventing crime financing and money laundering, selected a contractor to develop a bitcoin transaction tracking tool to severely reduce the anonymity of the crypto. Currently, reporting such information is voluntary.

Mining Activity

As with any cold country with access to cheap electricity, Russia is a mining hub. That being said, the electricity in Russia is generally not cheap enough to encourage mining, but some mining operations have managed to secure agreements with energy providers for wholesale prices. For its energy production, Siberia outperforms any other region for mining, with Bratsk, Irkutsk, and Krasnoyarsk particularly standing out. The excess energy facilitates these types of agreements, enabling mining facilities to source from the wholesale market. In addition to this, the low temperatures reduce the cooling costs.

Russia generally accounts for around 7% of Bitcoin mining hash rate according to Statista, vying with Kazakhstan for third place globally.

However, that is not to say that crypto mining in this region is without difficulties. There have been legal uncertainties in the past — as well as a high degree of illegal mining operations that accounted for $6.6M worth of stolen energy. With the new legal framework, mining is allowed as long as:

Mining hardware is owned in the name of a foreign entity
Exchange and mining pool activities are carried out with overseas entities
Domestic firms providing hosting do not use their own hardware for proprietary mining.

This is largely due to the fact that paying with cryptocurrencies in exchange for services is illegal under the new law — placing miners in a difficult position when receiving bitcoin mining rewards.

BitRiver — the largest known bitcoin miner hosting provider in Russia, has a partnership with the hydro energy provider, En+ Group, to get energy for less than wholesale price. Their joint venture is called Bit+ and offers hosting services near Bratsk. The Moscow-based company serves clients mainly in the US, Japan, the UAE, and China.
Minery — also largely operating out of Bratsk using hydroelectricity,
MineSpot — a relatively new entrant in 2020, MineSpot offers hosting services based near Kodisnk in one of Russia’s largest farms. They mine both Ether and Bitcoin and, in addition to this, also provide container services.
BitCluster — operating since 2017, this mining hosting provider has data centres in the Ivanovo, Angarsk, and Norilsk regions of Russia. They claim to host more than 12,000 devices.

While there have been significant changes to the law starting in 2020, more are expected to come that may impact miners. However, there is also a concerted effort to attract Chinese mining equipment during the government-spurred exodus. Already most mining equipment is imported from China, either directly or by way of Kazakhstan. There are three major pools focussed on the Russian market, including EMCD, Sigmapool, and Trustpool.

Top Exchanges

The rapidly shifting regulatory landscape — especially that of taxation, which are expected to be solidified — makes investing in crypto a bit tricky, both from the perspective of the user and the exchange. Coinbase, for instance, doesn’t operate in Russia at all.

Additionally, there is a high propensity for crypto-to-cash services.

However, there are still a fair number of exchanges operating in the region.

Binance — unsurprisingly, global leader, Binance, also has a strong presence in Russia, even boasting a local community. In addition to a Russian interface, they offer crypto-to-ruble exchanges (since 2019), and now support the ruble for their peer-to-peer exchange.
Matbea — a Russian-based wallet and exchange that started operating in 2014, this is a fairly old player in the Russian market. However, it is still viewed as somewhat niche.
HitBTC — founded in 2013 by Hong Kong-based Hit Solutions Ltd., this company has a mixed reputionation. Little is known about the founders, but they raised $6M from angel investors. The platform offers trading, OTC trading, token losing, margin trading, and APIs, as well as over 800 trading pairs.
YoBit — a custodial exchange founded in 2015, YoBit is valued for not requireing KYC checks to begin trading (due to being registered in Panama). This exchange also boasts one of the highest number of listed tokens — a double-edged sword, as this also leads to a high degree of scam projects.
EXMO — a UK-based exchange, EXMO was initially launched by a group of Russian crypto enthusiasts, and has headquarters in Russia and Ukraine. It continues to be a leader in Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian markets. Since its founding, it has expanded services to now offer wallets, API capabilities, and their own coin — EXMO.

Additionally peer-to-peer exchanges are seeing a surge in users in response to the uncertain regulatory landscape.

Paxful, a leading P2P exchange, reported a 350% increase in Russian usage from May 2019 to May 2020.

LocalBitcoins and Bitzlato are other popular P2P service providers.

Funding & Top Projects

Russia is often cited as producing some of the top blockchain developers. And, while the 2017 ICO boom made clear that there was a strong market, it also revealed the need to move outside the borders to find significant funding. There are some VCs operating in the region, though, with the following being the most active.

Internet Initiatives Development Fund (IIDF) — This Moscow-based VC provides early stage and seed capital. It invested over 300M rubles in Russian tech startups and works to grow a thriving Russian ecosystem for tech companies with its accelerator.
Emery Capital — Emery Capital is an early and growth-stage venture capital firm focused on emerging technologies. It operates on a global scale and in 2019 participated in the seed round funding for Chronicled which raised $3M.
GVA LaunchGurus Fund 1 L.P. — With hubs in Palo Alto and Moscow, this VC focuses on early-stage and seed investments in primarily Eastern European IT startups. In 2020, they participated in 1World Online’s Series A funding round, which closed just under $8.5M. While they are a stand alone fund, they have ties to the GVA LaunchGurus Accelerator.
BitBlock Group — A blockchain and crypto venture capital firm focussed on early-stage digital investments. It has hubs in China, South Korea, Singapore, Switzerland, and the US, as well as in Russia (Moscow). They also offer incubation services for tech companies and its investment portfolio mentions projects such as Republic, Hash World, and FTX.

Crypto and blockchain are seen as good opportunities for Russian entrepreneurs, but there are several implications when launching a business in Russia (linked to the politics and ransomware attacks). This makes foreign investors wary of funding projects registered in the region.

This led to a trend of Russian-born founders and devs leaving the country to work on projects elsewhere, or even for Russian developed projects to register outside of the Federation (commonly the EU, US, or Singapore).

For instance, the cryptobank, Crypterium, was founded in 2017 in Estonia by two Russian entrepreneurs and closed an ICO of €47.5M in the same year. Vasiliy Suvorov was one of the founders of the Crypto Valley Association, founded in 2017 in Switzerland. TabTrader, a mobile-first trading app, was founded in 2013 by Denis Suslov, Kirill Suslov, and Yaroslav Madarakh, and now has its headquarters in Amsterdam.

There are some notable exceptions to this rule, though. The Waves Platform, founded by Sasha Ivanov in 2016, remains with the financial hub in Moscow, and raised $120M at the end of 2018 in a funding round led by Dolfin. The decentralised exchange, Deex, also has its headquarters in Moscow and raised $2.1M in its last funding round led by the American Initialized Capital and the Chinese Zhen Fund.

DeFi Ecosystem

As a strong-hold of crypto users, there is also a great deal of interest in DeFi. In response to this interest, the Solana Foundation raised $60M to develop DeFi, NFT, and cybersecurity blockchain applications in Russia, as well as Ukraine, Brazil, and India. Hacken, Gate.io, Coin DCX, and BRZ are all among the investors of this fund.

In addition to this, even with the recent legislation, Sberbank, Russia’s largest bank, is spearheading plans for a settlement token — colloquially called Sbercoin. Under their Blockchain Lab, this marks a turn towards a new future, where developers can build an open blockchain ecosystem, complete with new products and business models, reconnected to traditional systems through this digital fiat money. This project is linked to DeFi in that the tokenised fiat currency can be used in smart contracts, enabling the ruble to pioneer new opportunities in this market.

Whether or not the Central Bank will approve these plans remains up in the air. However, the stipulations for tokenisation in the new law leave some hopes. But, with the Central Bank looking into a CBDC, there are still concerns that this new asset would be seen as competition to legal tender, which will likely spell its end. Sberbank aims to create a complementary system, though. As Sber plans to submit the blockchain platform to the Central Bank by mid-September, we should have concrete answers soon.

Further, there are a number of instrumental DeFi projects with Russians at their core. Ethereum is of course the most famous and biggest, with Canadian-Russian Co-Founder, Vitalik Buterin. On top of this POA Network, Yearn.Finance, Curve, and 1inch all have Russians in leadership roles, although none are registered or headquartered in the Federation. Russian talent started the DeFi revolution, and continues to play an instrumental role in driving it forward. While that’s true in entirely decentralised projects, Sberbank’s initiative also gestures to an interesting future, although one that does not quite meet the ideals behind many’s vision for a decentralised system.

NFT Ecosystem

The NFT craze is generating significant engagement among Russians. Similar to the 2017 ICO era, Russian citizens’ tech savvy created the perfect environment to foster the trend.

The list of projects initiated and headed by Russians is long, and recent news about NFTs involve institutions such as the Russian Hermitage and media outlets, like Meduza.

This year, the Hermitage museum in St. Petersburg auctioned virtual copies of five masterpieces on the Binance NFT marketplace. The project was implemented to promote the museum collection and support the ‘digitalization in art collecting’. Despite the effort to overcome several challenges posed by the new Russian crypto law, the Hermitage’s willingness to explore the potential of blockchain tech for the art sector remains strong.

Further, NFTs were used to support journalists of the Russian media outlet, Meduza, with an auction promoted by two of the main Russian NFT communities — NFT Bastards and Non-Fungible Females. Artists from different Eastern-European countries created two collages, sold on Rarible this May.

Another impressive project was run by the feminist group, Pussy Riot, leading the trend of NFTs for activist art. The monetisation of the group’s song ‘Panic Attack’ was used to support building of shelters for domestic violence victims. This raised a lot of traction in March 2021, collecting over $300,000 from the first NFT alone. According to The Art Newspaper, Covid-19 also played a key role in spreading the trend, providing a means to support artists during quarantines and lockdowns.

Therefore, it appears clear use of NFTs among Russians primarily concerns the art market, with both individual creators and galleries leveraging this trend to make their art virtual and accessible to a broader audience. Among famous Russian artists that decided to embrace NFTs we have the following:

Pavel Pepperstein and Sonya Stereostyrski, a famous post conceptualist artist and multimedia designer, realised the “New World”, a NFT piece of their long collaboration ‘PPSS group’, released on Rarible.
Aristarkh Chernyshev, who has always been interested in the effect of new technologies on society, created a series of art pieces related to the topic. Among them, “Personal Informational Organism. PiO v1.1”, his first NFT sold in April 2021.
Nikita Replyanski was one of the first Russian artists who released his work on an NFT platform, SuperRare, in 2020. The piece sold for 3.5 ETH.
Pokras Lampas, different from other abovementioned artists, is a street artist and subscribed to Binance NFT marketplace as a creator this year, participating in the “100 Creators” campaign. His first drop sold on the Foundation Platform for 16 ETH.
Artem Tkach is a digital artist whose work has also been exhibited at the Hermitage Museum. He is involved in NFTs as both an artist and a curator.

However, there are other prominent NFTs projects going on in Russia:

The NFT platform Rarible was co-founded by Alexei Falin and Alexander Salnikov and operates with a Russia-based team.
SketchAR is a mobile drawing app that enables a NFT infrastructure to monetise artwork and collaborates with popular marketplaces ― like OpenSea ― to place them on the market. However, the app also has its own marketplace.
Foil Network offers blockchain-as-a-service (BaaS) products and was created by the Russian blockchain specialist, Evgenii Kuzin. They launched what is called the ‘Pure NFT standard’ ― a new iteration for ERC-721 and BEP-721 standards that enable the permanent storage of token data on blockchain.

The most popular NFT platforms used by Russian artists includes Rarible, Foundation Platform, SuperRare, Async, and OpenSea.

Community Channels & Influencers

Crypto community channels in Russia are often integrated with other Russian-speaking markets, like Ukraine, Belarus, and portions of other countries. That being said, some of the most active crypto communities are in St. Petersburg and Moscow.

Twitter, Telegram, Facebook, and Vkontakte (VK) — kind of like a Russian Facebook — make up the most popular communication channels. Telegram and VK also share leadership in Pavel Durov, who founded both, although now, only heads Telegram.

Telegram is generally the most used, despite being banned by the government in 2018 (lifted in 2020). The government went so far as to block all sites with links to Telegram, including giants like Amazon, which eventually backfired as it shut down part of government operations. Ironically, this spurred greater interest in Telegram, as users saw the lengths the company took to develop technical work arounds and commitment to the market. Now, there are large groups dedicated to sharing crypto news and trading updates, and most major crypto publications also host their own Telegram groups. These include:

Gagarin Crypto — with 6.18K subscribers, this group shares news and analysis related to funding updates, new projects, and more.
The VSЁ — with 7.06K subscribers, this channel shares airdrops, trading tips, and general news about the market.

Twitter is used more for public information, as well as links to global crypto communities. As such, popular influencers tend to post in English. Any list of Russian influencers would be incomplete without mention of Vitalik Buterin, one of the most influential people in crypto. However, there are several influencers with a more contained focus on the region. These include Mike Chobanian, the CEO of Ukrainian Kuna exchange, and Sasha Ivanov, the Founder of Waves, with 124.1K followers on Twitter. CZ is also fairly popular among Russian investors.

VK and Facebook are less active in the crypto sphere, but still plays a part in hosting groups, events, and enabling direct communication. VK even went as far as to launch VKCoin, although the currency was not based on DLT. In January 2020, the company was also acquired by the government, although day-to-day operations are more or less the same.

There are a number of crypto media outlets for the Russian-speaking market.

ForkLog — operating since 2014, it is widely seen as the largest of them, but is registered in Europe as to enable them to legally receive crypto payments. The site covers news, education, and research (especially spurred by the ICO boom) and has a YouTube channel for programming, securities, and technical and economic analysis.
DeCenter — a blockchain and crypto news outlet, they also run a Telegram group with no interactions and over 100K followers.
Blockchain.ru — a news platform that covers blockchain, DeFi, NFTs, and crypto.
Pro.Blockchain — on top of their media outlet, they run both a Telegram group (35K members) and YouTube channel (150K followers).

Bitsmedia, Crypto Feed, CryptoPanic and BitNovosti, as well as Russian translations of CoinGecko and Binance Academy, are also important contributors to the crypto news cycle. While these platforms publish in Russian, there is a notable trend of translating to English and moving in English speaking spheres, in line with the move to find funding outside of Russia.

The same happens with Medium blogs. While the platform hosts a few Russian-language blogs, like 3Commas Blog and DTI Algorithmic, most Russian writers who choose Medium as a channel prefer to translate the content to English to access a broader audience. However, for those that prefer to maintain the article in its original language, Habr is a great alternative. Habr is an open publishing platform where writers can be remunerated for their content in a similar way to Medium, the market is more local and thus smaller but less competitive, making the number of views grow more easily.

Blockchain in Academia

As a leader in blockchain developers, it’s no surprise that the Russian Federation boasts a number of blockchain courses in higher education. However, blockchain degrees in the nation are not solely focussed on the development side, as there are also several courses geared more towards the economic and legal impact of the technology.

Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT) — This university offers a two year Masters in Blockchain. The course includes a partnership with IBM and Nornickel, where participants can intern, and provides students with the opportunity to build their own blockchain projects and develop smart contracts on Ethereum.
Don State Technical University — This university, located in the south of the Russian Federation, offers two Masters that touch on blockchain. The first, “Applied Informatics”, includes study of intelligent systems based on blockchain technology, as well as other topics related to computer science and analytical economies. The second, a “World Economics” degree, covers the fundamentals of blockchain technologies, as well as legal foundations for working with crypto and blockchain projects.
Novosibirsk State University — NSU offers a Masters in Cryptography, which includes a module on Blockchain: “Mathematical Problems and Applications”. While this programme covers topics outside of blockchain, this portion touches on cryptocurrencies, mining mechanisms, and the Bitcoin protocol in the context of anonymity, traceability, and security.

In addition to these degree programmes, Innopolis University also boasts a Research Centre for Blockchain Technology and St. Petersburg State University has a Distributed Ledger Technologies Center. Both mention that research is related to the development goals of the Federation, such as accelerating technological development, implementing digital technologies in the economic and social sectors, creating an export-focussed industry based on advanced technologies and highly-qualified personnel, and connecting different members of the market.

What’s on the Horizon?

In line with many other national governments, Russia is interested in blockchain, but not necessarily open to seeing decentralised cryptocurrencies flourish. Even while limits are placed on crypto, and an extensive tax law is being discussed, Elvira Nabiullina, the Central Bank’s Governor, believes that digital currencies will be the future of financial systems.

While the Covid-19 crisis of 2020 and 2021 drove rapid moves towards digitisation, Russia was already on this path. In 2017, when President Putin revised his views on blockchain, he announced that the nation would be developing a digital ruble, known as the CryptoRuble. Now, in 2021, this is finally being realised, with the prototype expected to be ready before the end of the year and pilots starting early next year.

This new iteration of the ruble will be used to drive the digital economy in Russia, by lowering transaction costs, and may even be used to sidestep sanctions.

The CryptoRuble’s imminent testing is also believed to have heavily influenced the current legislation on crypto, which explicitly bans the use of crypto as a payment. The Russian Federation is perceived to be following an similar, although more lenient path to China, which also restricted crypto activity before testing a digital Yuan.

However, Russia has not only gone the route of limiting crypto use, but the government is even investing in a technology to de-anonymise bitcoin — a step that if seen to fruition will have sever consequences for the entire industry. Even so, this technology is years out, and the drive of the Russian market is far from slowing.

With some of the highest rates of crypto adoption globally, and the continued supply of the best and brightest minds behind blockchain, Russia — both the government and the people — will continue to significantly drive influence in this market, albeit in different directions.