Sberbank, Russia’s largest bank, has started testing bitcoin, ether and USDT trading inside the Sberbank Online app and plans to open the service to all clients on December 1, 2026, pending final rules from the Bank of Russia.
The bank’s press service told the Russian business daily Vedomosti on October 8 that retail clients can already test transactions in bitcoin, ether, Tether’s USDT and other popular crypto assets inside Sberbank Online, the consumer app the bank says serves tens of millions of users. The same functions are planned for the SberInvestments brokerage app and the SberBusiness corporate platform, so the bank intends to cover retail, brokerage and business customers with one product line.
Sberbank’s head start is formal as well as practical. On October 6, two days before the announcement, it became the first company entered into the central bank’s new digital depository register, the legal foundation the bank needs to custody digital assets for clients. Being first on that register is what makes the app trial possible at all.
The trial period is not a formality. Russian regulators have consistently favored a pilot-then-scale pattern across digital asset initiatives, from the cross-border settlement experiments to the central bank’s own digital ruble work, and each pilot has come with reporting duties and staged expansion. The bank will be watching settlement behavior, custody operation and fraud patterns during the test phase before it signs off on anything like a full launch.
Caps, limits and a very large prize
Ordinary retail investors face a hard annual purchase cap of 300,000 rubles, roughly $3,400 at current exchange rates. The Bank of Russia will set the final list of tradable assets before the December launch, and Sberbank’s December 1 target date assumes those rules arrive on schedule.
The demand side is where the numbers get serious. Sberbank’s own analysts, citing Finance Ministry data, put Russians’ daily crypto turnover near 50 billion rubles, and the bank’s research arm estimates it can channel up to 4 trillion rubles of retail crypto trading, about $45 billion, onto the regulated platform by 2027. That projection describes a migration, not organic growth: crypto activity in Russia has run for years through offshore exchanges and peer-to-peer channels, and the bank is betting it can move a large share of that flow onto a regulated rail inside an app customers already open every morning.
What testing means in practice is that selected users can execute real transactions in a limited set of assets while the bank watches settlement, custody and compliance flows before the public launch. Russian regulators have favored this pilot-then-scale pattern across digital asset initiatives, and the central bank’s final asset list and operational rules are the last gate before the December target.
Competition will not wait. VTB and other major Russian banks are building their own regulated crypto services and watching how the central bank writes the rulebook. Each wants to become the front door for one of the world’s most active retail crypto markets, and the register entry creates a clear first-mover advantage that rivals will now work to erode.
The demand-side estimate deserves one more caveat: turnover measured in rubles includes activity on platforms the bank cannot see, and persuading those users to move into a capped, KYC-heavy environment is an assumption, not a certainty. Peer-to-peer markets survive precisely because they offer what regulated products cannot, including anonymity and no purchase limits. Sberbank is betting that convenience, safety and brand trust beat those advantages for most households.
From grey market to bank product
The move caps a year of policy shifts in Moscow. Russian law now allows crypto settlement in cross-border foreign trade as a work-around for sanctions-hobbled payment channels, and the Finance Ministry has sponsored pilot frameworks for institutional investors while the central bank sets the operating conditions. The digital depository register, which Sberbank entered first, is the infrastructure piece that turns those pilots into bank-grade custody.
The bank’s 4-trillion-ruble projection should be read with caution. It is Sberbank’s own estimate, not a regulator’s forecast, and the 300,000-ruble annual cap for ordinary investors will keep direct retail exposure small in the first phase. The central bank has historically pushed back on aggressive retail crypto promotion, and its final asset list could trim what the app actually offers. Corporate and qualified investors are where volume is expected to build first, which is why the corporate platform matters as much as the consumer app.
For the market itself, the significance is about legitimacy as much as volume. A bank with a federal brand putting bitcoin next to savings accounts changes how the asset is perceived by households that would never open an offshore exchange account, and it gives regulators a single, supervised counterparty to monitor instead of thousands of informal channels.
Still, the practical effect is hard to overstate. A bank app that millions of Russians open daily will soon carry bitcoin and ether rows next to savings accounts and card balances, with custody handled by the country’s biggest bank under central bank supervision. Crypto in Russia is moving from a grey-market activity to a bank product with a brand on it. Whether December 1 holds, and what the central bank finally allows, will determine how far that shift goes in the first year.
For Western observers the episode carries a double edge. Regulated crypto custody at Russia’s biggest bank could make sanctioned flows harder to trace if the corporate side is used widely, and compliance teams in Europe and the US will be watching which entities Sberbank accepts onto the business platform. The retail cap limits that risknear term, but the December launch will be examined in Washington and Brussels as closely as in Moscow.