Russians Hold ₽3.7 Trillion in Crypto. How This Was Calculated

The number of cryptocurrency users in Russia is 20 million, and their total investments in crypto amount to ₽3.7 trillion. This estimate was provided on September 21 by Ivan Chebeskov, Deputy Minister of Finance. This amount includes both direct ownership of digital currencies and financial products linked to them.

Three months ago, the Bank of Russia estimated the average monthly amount of funds held by Russians on foreign centralized crypto exchanges at ₽720 billion. An additional ₽3.8 billion was attributed to synthetic investments through Russian instruments, including structured bonds, futures, and digital financial assets. In an earlier review, the Central Bank estimated the volume of transactions by Russians from October 2024 to March 2025 at ₽7.3 trillion.

Experts told RBC-Crypto how such data is calculated, which wallets are tracked, which are not subject to monitoring, and in which direction analytical tools are developing.

Where the Numbers Come From

₽3.7 trillion is an expert estimate, not a result of direct statistical measurement, explained Matvey Voitov, director of the Web3 Tech research center. According to him, this figure is plausible as an order of magnitude but requires several caveats.

The gap between ₽720 billion (average monthly balance according to the Central Bank) and ₽3.7 trillion (total estimate by the Ministry of Finance) is explained by the fact that the Central Bank only considers balances on platforms, while the Ministry of Finance includes other forms of ownership and assesses the market more broadly, the expert said. He noted that the Ministry of Finance's estimate of $44 billion at the current exchange rate is comparable to data from the blockchain analytics company Chainalysis.

In 2025, Chainalysis presented a report stating that the volume of incoming crypto transactions to Russia over the year amounted to $376.3 billion, making the country the leader in Europe in terms of cryptocurrency usage. These are turnover figures, but they indirectly confirm the scale of the market, Voitov clarified.

According to Dmitry Tsarkov, director of trading operations at GBIH Holdings, the figure provided by the Ministry of Finance is a conservative lower boundary of the actual volume of assets. Most likely, this figure was obtained by extrapolating the share of Russian web traffic on the largest international exchanges to their total user balances, as well as through the analysis of indirect sociological metrics, the expert suggested.

"Considering that historically Russia has generated between five to ten percent of activity on leading centralized trading platforms, and taking into account the acute need of businesses and private capital for cross-border settlements amid the current geopolitical situation, the actual volume of accumulated capital may be significantly higher than the stated value," Tsarkov said.

He pointed out that the analytical tools of Rosfinmonitoring, including the "Transparent Blockchain" software complex relied upon by the Central Bank, are effective in cluster analysis of transactions and de-anonymization of addresses interacting with local fiat gateways. However, this architecture has conceptual limitations, Tsarkov believes. He explained that the tool is primarily focused on compliance control and identifying shadow flows, being unable to reliably assess funds on non-custodial wallets or those involved in DeFi (decentralized finance).

The Bank of Russia indeed emphasizes the importance of such analytical tools specifically in identifying dirty cryptocurrency associated with any crimes. More than 80 Russian banks have already connected to the "Transparent Blockchain" program, Rosfinmonitoring reported on September 25.

Additional methods of regulators include comprehensive analysis of banking statistics, in particular, monitoring acquiring and P2P transfers classified by banking scoring as operations with digital assets, Tsarkov said. However, according to the expert, this only allows for recording liquidity turnover, not investor balances.

How to Accurately Calculate Crypto Volumes

Considering that cryptocurrency users can remain anonymous, estimating their numbers is always a challenging task, says Voitov. According to him, a technical tool for such an assessment could be an attempt to combine on-chain analysis with user behavior analysis on the internet — along with their IP addresses and application data (many applications save settings for time and place of use).

Such analysis will be based on identifying real users after filtering out unnecessary addresses: custodial wallets, Sybil addresses (multiple addresses belonging to one user), and technical wallets of exchanges or applications, the expert explained. For example, for the TON blockchain, there are already open databases that allow excluding exchange wallets, trading bots, and Sybil addresses from the analysis. <<However, absolute accuracy is unattainable due to the very nature of crypto assets: non-custodial wallets are not tied to an identity, P2P transactions are not reflected in fiat reporting, and cross-border flows are difficult to link to a specific jurisdiction>>, Voitov said.

In his opinion, a realistic goal is not an exact number, but an agreed range that will be refined as regulation and analytical tools develop.

Tsarkov agreed with the unattainability of obtaining an absolutely accurate picture. However, in his opinion, the most relevant approach to assessment lies in a comprehensive audit of liquidity bottlenecks — points of conversion between crypto and fiat currency, including institutional over-the-counter markets and data from platforms that comply with customer identification procedures.

In the medium term, the assessment toolkit will become more accurate due to the implementation of standards from the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), the expert believes. At the same time, according to him, in a scenario of strict regulatory policy, there is a high probability that a significant portion of capital will migrate to anonymous networks and non-custodial solutions, which will maintain the gap between official statistics and the real cryptocurrency capital of Russians.

At the end of 2025, when the Bank of Russia presented the concept of regulating the crypto market, the first deputy chairman of the Central Bank, Vladimir Chistyukhin, said that this issue <<is attracting serious international attention, primarily from the FATF>>. According to him, regulation in Russia <> precisely <>.

In the spring, the FATF called for the regulation of non-custodial crypto wallets that allow direct transfers between users without the involvement of regulated intermediaries. According to Russian laws, users must report their assets in non-custodial wallets to the Federal Tax Service (FNS). This week, the Ministry of Finance reminded that tax residents must report all cryptocurrency transactions outside the regulated framework.

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