Funds are operated by Moscow Exchange and based on BlackRock ETFs.
Crypto-keen Russians are spending millions of dollars on domestic financial products based on BlackRock Bitcoin and Ethereum exchange-traded funds.
That’s according to the country’s central bank, which, according to the Russian outlet RBC, says that the worth of individual investments in cryptocurrency futures contract funds on the Moscow Exchange, the MOEX, currently totals over $27 million.
The majority of investors are “building small portfolios” of shares in the funds worth up to $6,430, the bank said. But the largest contributions are “made by a few larger-scale investors, whose open positions are worth more than [$1.3 million],” it added.
Considering the funds launched as recently as mid-July, the data points to growing crypto adoption rates in Russia, as investors look for alternatives to international markets.
The bank said it was unconcerned by the development. “Total private investments in Russian financial instruments related to [cryptocurrencies] amount to approximately [$48 million],” the bank said. “This does not pose any systemic risk to the Russian economy.”
The Moscow Exchange launched its first futures contracts, based on share prices of the BlackRock iShares Bitcoin Trust ETF, in early June.
MOEX followed up with a similar product based on the iShares Ethereum Trust ETF in July.
The central bank also noted, in its quarterly financial stability report, that the volume of Russia-linked trade on overseas crypto exchanges has fallen in recent months.
This drop will come as a surprise to some, with other statistics from Russia pointing to a rise in adoption rates.
At the end of September, it said, the majority of Russian citizens’ crypto on overseas crypto exchanges was held in Bitcoin.
The bank thinks Russian citizens collectively hold $7.7 billion worth of Bitcoin, as well as almost $2 billion worth of Ethereum and altcoins worth $2.7 billion.
The central bank compiles its data using a tool named Transparent Blockchain, developed in part by Rosfinmonitoring, the Russian anti-money laundering agency.
The government says Transparent Blockchain lets it analyse the volume of inflows and outflows of funds from Russian citizens’ wallets to some of the largest centralized crypto exchanges in the world.
The bank said that it monitored transactions at Binance, Bitfinex, Bittrex, Bybit, Gate, HTX, KuCoin, Mexc, OKX, Poloniex, and “several other exchanges popular with Russians.”
However, the bank conceded that there may have been a growth in the number of Russians using decentralised exchanges in recent months. And it said that this may explain the sharp drop in centralized exchanges’ Russian user numbers.
