Russia to Ban Peer-to-Peer Bitcoin Trading by July 2027

The significance lies less in the prohibition itself than in the mandatory routing of all trades through state-approved intermediaries, which converts a permissionless activity into a licensed one and hands the central bank direct visibility over retail crypto flows. The burden falls on ordinary Russian users and the informal P2P marketplaces that have served as an on-ramp, while approved brokers and exchanges become the sole gatekeepers. Whether users migrate to those venues or seek workarounds is the open question, and the same question applies to other jurisdictions weighing comparable broker-only models.