Moscow Exchange Launched Perpetual Futures on Crypto Indices. A Lawyer Explains What Investors Actually Buy

On 22 September, Moscow Exchange began trading perpetual futures on its own crypto indices covering bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, XRP and TRON. The contracts are cash-settled, one-day instruments with automatic rollover. They are quoted in US dollars, settled in Russian rubles, and no underlying asset is delivered. Only qualified investors can trade them.

The scale is no longer experimental. According to the exchange, more than 72,000 qualified investors have traded its crypto futures since the first contracts launched in summer 2025, with cumulative volume above 600 billion rubles.

The question for an investor stays the same regardless: what exactly do you hold when you open one of these positions? We put it to Andrey Stoyanov, attorney and head of the cryptocurrency and digital financial assets practice at Delcredere.

The five new contracts

Contract	Underlying index	Asset
BTCUSDF	MOEXBTC	Bitcoin
ETHUSDF	MOEXETH	Ethereum
SOLUSDF	MOEXSOL	Solana
XRPUSDF	MOEXXRP	XRP
TRXUSDF	MOEXTRX	TRON

Settlement is in cash, with no crypto delivery. Funding parameters per the specification are K1 at 0% and K2 at 0.35%.

This is the exchange's second step in the same direction. On 18 November 2025 it launched futures on its bitcoin and ether indices, which are calculated from the prices of shares in foreign exchange-traded funds holding the corresponding cryptocurrencies.

What the investor actually holds

"The investor does not buy or receive the cryptocurrency itself. The futures contract is a cash-settled derivative whose underlying is the value of a Moscow Exchange index linked to the price of a cryptocurrency.

Settlement happens in money, through a central counterparty. No digital depository accounts are involved, no addresses, no access keys. It is an ordinary exchange-traded instrument."

Andrey Stoyanov, attorney, head of cryptocurrency and digital financial assets, Delcredere

That point is worth unpacking, because it defines the entire risk profile.

There is no wallet, no private key and no question about where the asset is held. No hacking risk, no lost access, no mistyped transfer address. And no need to deal with the digital depository that the new regulation introduces for the spot market.

In exchange, there is no asset either. The holder cannot withdraw bitcoin, spend it or move it to their own address. What they get is a financial result, calculated from the index value and paid in rubles.

There is also something spot ownership does not have: the contract is quoted in dollars and settled in rubles. The outcome therefore depends not only on the index but on the conversion rate applied.

Tax: the biggest difference from holding crypto

This is where the two routes to exposure diverge most sharply, and not in favour of spot.

"The taxation of crypto futures differs from direct ownership of cryptocurrency.

Since 1 September, the sale of digital currency is governed by a separate article of the Tax Code, with its own rules for calculating the base. If the result is a loss, that loss simply burns: it does not reduce tax on other income.

A futures contract, by contrast, is taxed under the ordinary rules for derivatives, which have been in place for a long time. A loss on it can be offset against profits on other exchange-traded instruments, although exactly which instruments qualify for that offset is not entirely clear yet. We are waiting for official clarification."

Andrey Stoyanov

A simple example makes the point, because "the loss burns" stays abstract right up until the first losing year.

Say an investor is down on crypto and up on equities. Under direct ownership of digital currency, the crypto loss stays inside its own bucket and the tax on the equity gain is paid in full. Through a futures contract, the result falls under the derivatives regime, where offsetting against other exchange-traded instruments is available.

The second half of that quote deserves equal attention. Which instruments qualify for the offset has not been settled, and the lawyer says plainly that he is waiting for clarification. Planning a tax strategy around an unresolved question is not advisable.

Why qualified investors only

The law that took effect on 1 September 2026 allowed non-qualified investors to buy cryptocurrency for the first time: after passing a test, and within a limit of 300,000 rubles per year through a single intermediary. Qualified investors face no monetary cap, though testing applies to them too.

Futures on crypto indices, however, are closed to non-qualified investors entirely.

"The central bank has said many times that cryptocurrency is a risky asset, and it closed futures to non-qualified investors precisely so that mass-market investors would not move into an instrument whose risks they do not fully understand. The regulator may change its view later."

Andrey Stoyanov

The logic is legible. Spot exposure with a 300,000 ruble cap limits losses to the size of the investment. A leveraged derivative has no such natural ceiling.

What comes next

The exchange plans to launch spot crypto trading in December. That is a different construction: it brings in the digital depository, custody questions, and direct ownership of the asset with all of its tax consequences.

The regulation has further to run as well. Market participants have until 1 July 2027 to obtain licences under the transition period. Paying for goods and services with cryptocurrency inside Russia remains prohibited.

Five indices, or one basket

One structural detail is worth noting at the end, because it differs from how the global benchmark market works.

Moscow Exchange publishes five indices, and each one tracks a single asset. MOEXBTC is bitcoin, MOEXSOL is Solana. An investor who wants diversified exposure assembles it manually from several contracts and decides the proportions themselves.

Global benchmarks stopped doing it that way long ago. The Nasdaq CME Crypto Index holds bitcoin and Ethereum permanently while other assets rotate through eligibility rules. The CoinDesk 20 holds twenty assets with a 30% cap on the largest and 20% on the rest. CCi30 weights thirty assets by the square root of market capitalization. Our own CI100 blends four factors: size, volume, liquidity and volatility.

The difference is not cosmetic. A single-asset index is another way of looking at one price. A multi-asset index is a decision about how to weight a market, and that decision is where most of an index provider's work lives.

Whether Russia gets basket products rather than single-coin ones is an open question. It would take methodology, infrastructure and demand. For now, an investor who wants a broad slice of the market builds it by hand.

You can compare how the major global crypto indices are constructed on our indices page.

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About the expert. Andrey Stoyanov is an attorney and head of the cryptocurrency and digital financial assets practice at Delcredere, ranked by Kommersant, Pravo-300 and WN. Telegram: @tokenize_that.

This article is for information only and does not constitute individual investment or tax advice. Contract parameters are per Moscow Exchange data as of the publication date.