Bank of Russia Drafts a 1% Capital Cap on Banks' Crypto Exposure

Russian banks would be allowed to put no more than 1% of their own capital into crypto exposure under draft rules the Bank of Russia released on Friday. The draft creates two new ratios, N31 for a single bank and N32 for a banking group measured on a consolidated basis, and caps both at 1% of own funds. Positions a bank holds on its own account would carry a risk weight of 1,250% in its capital calculations. Reporting is due to begin in January 2027. Kommersant reported the draft on Friday evening, and CryptoSlate and crypto.news followed over the weekend with the same core numbers.

What counts toward the cap

The scope is wide. According to CryptoSlate's reading of the draft, the ratios capture direct and indirect crypto holdings and derivatives priced off crypto. They also take in loans, bonds, guarantees, repos and credit lines whose value or settlement depends on crypto or on what the draft calls foreign digital instruments. crypto.news lists the same instruments. Netting is limited. Assets judged liquid and at low risk of being blocked sit in a first group where long and short positions can offset each other, crypto.news reports, while a second group is measured by whichever side is larger. Kommersant describes the same split in its own terms.

Client custody gets a lighter weight

The draft separates a bank's own bets from assets it keeps for customers. Where a bank holds crypto for a client and does not bear the loss from seizure or transaction restrictions on those assets, the position stays out of N31 and N32 altogether. It still counts toward capital adequacy, at a 50% risk weight, CryptoSlate and crypto.news both report. Custody the bank is liable for is treated like its own holdings. That is a factor of 25 between the two weights.

The Russian cap is tighter on paper than one proposed elsewhere this year. Singapore's regulator floated a 2% limit, measured against Tier 1 capital and only for tokens on permissionless blockchains, when it deferred the Basel crypto capital rules to 2027. The two ratios use different bases, so they do not compare one for one.

Details carried by one account

Some of the mechanics appear only in crypto.news, and we could not match them against a second report. It says crypto derivatives take a 36% risk factor and that maturity coefficients run from 5% to 85%, the top rate applying to terms of 37 months or more. A bank would have to stay under the ceiling every operating day. Six or more breaches within 30 consecutive operating days would bring action from the central bank, by that account. Kommersant, for its part, lists risks the regulator named, among them a stablecoin issuer unilaterally zeroing balances. It also puts Russians' holdings on centralized exchanges at about 720 billion rubles in the first quarter. Neither detail appears in the English-language reports.

A rule without a date yet

Nothing here is final. The Bank of Russia plans to publish the rule formally in the fourth quarter, and it would take effect 10 days later, according to CryptoSlate and PANews. Banks would then report instrument turnover and their N31 and N32 values from January 2027. The reporting forms are still being drafted. Central banks keep reaching for hard numbers on crypto, and the Bank of England has proposed a £40 billion cap per systemic stablecoin on a separate question. The Russian draft does not say which day in the quarter publication will fall, and the forms that define what banks report have not been released.