NewsLink: Moscow Stock Exchange Welcomes Crypto-Currency Trade

A trader at the Moscow Stock Exchange speaks on a telephone at his desk with a view of Red Square. Qualified investors will soon be able to buy and sell crypto-currencies and related products like ETFs on the Moscow Exchange. Russia is moving quickly to legitimize digital money, perhaps at some point in 2018.

Got Bitcoin? You can soon trade digital currencies against paper currency on the Moscow Stock Exchange. If you're a qualified investor, that is. In doing so, Russia would be the first stock exchange to make crypto-currency a new investable asset. They're not there yet. But wheels are in motion at the chief regulator of the Russian stock exchange.

Russia's Deputy Minister of Finance, Alexei Moiseyev, told Rossiya 24 on Tuesday that the exchange regulator will only allow for qualified investors to trade in crypto-currency in order to avoid large money laundering operations. Qualified investors in Russia need to have at least six million rubles in personal assets or 200 million rubles for investment firms.

Russians are some of the most savvy crypto-currency developers worldwide. Vitalik Buterin, a Russian born programmer who was educated at the University of Waterloo, BlackBerry's home turf, created Ethereum, a two-year old block chain-based computing platform that has its own digital currency called ether. That and bitcoin are the two biggest digital currencies in Russia.

Russia's crypto-businessman Dmitry Marinichev owns a virtual currencies mining farm in a former Soviet-era car factory warehouse in Moscow. 'The form of currency we are used to is about to disappear," he says.