Key Takeaways
Moex listed XRPUSDF and four sister contracts on Sept. 22, quoted in dollars and cash-settled in rubles.Over 72,000 qualified investors have traded Moex crypto futures, with turnover above $7.17B (RUB 600 billion).Russia’s retail buyers stay capped near $3,700 a year, so XRPUSDF volume hinges on professional traders.
Going Live
The contracts opened this morning in Moscow as Moex, Russia’s largest exchange, listed five cash-settled perpetual contracts, BTCUSDF, ETHUSDF, SOLUSDF, XRPUSDF and TRXUSDF, each tracking one of its in-house crypto indexes. The XRP contract follows the MOEXXRP benchmark.
A perpetual future is a derivative with no expiry date and Moex builds its version as a one-day contract that rolls over automatically, with prices quoted in U.S. dollars (while collateral, margin and final settlement run in rubles). No XRP changes hands at any point. The exchange set the contracts’ funding parameters, known as K1 and K2, at 0% and 0.35%.
The groundwork for the move was laid months ago with Bitcoin.com News reporting in May that Moex would launch indexes for SOL, XRP, Tron and BNB, pulling prices from Binance (50%), Bybit (20%), OKX (15%) and Bitget (15%), with futures to follow once each benchmark built a price history. Four months later, XRP has its perpetual. BNB, notably, did not make this cut.
Who Is Allowed to Trade?
Only qualified investors are allowed, i.e. institutions and individuals who clear wealth, income or experience thresholds under Russian securities laws.
It also bears mentioning that Russia’s new crypto legislation took effect Sept. 1, legalizing regulated crypto trading while capping retail investors at roughly $3,700 a year. It also hands the Bank of Russia the power to decide which coins licensed intermediaries may offer. Two weeks later, the central bank named cryptocurrencies a major risk to monetary sovereignty in its draft policy for 2027 to 2029.
So, from the outside looking in, the state seems to be building two markets at once:
One is a capped, supervised spot channel for ordinary savers. The other is a derivatives lane for professionals that never touches a blockchain.
XRP now sits in the second, next to bitcoin and ether.
Is There Real Demand Behind It?
The existing book says yes since more than 72,000 qualified investors had traded Moex’s crypto-linked futures by Sept. 16, with cumulative turnover above RUB 600 billion, roughly $7.1 billion at today’s exchange rate.
That track record began with bitcoin as Moex opened bitcoin futures to highly qualified investors in June 2025, in a contract then tied to Blackrock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT).
The launch seems to have caught a kind market because late yesterday afternoon, a short squeeze pushed bitcoin’s price close to $87,000. XRP too has been changing hands around $1.52, up 6% in 24 hours.
Offshore leverage is building too, with open interest on Binance XRPUSDT perpetual rising from about $370 million on Sept. 16 to roughly $541 million on Sept. 21, a 46% jump, while funding held at 0.01% per eight-hour window. Traders are paying a normal rate to stay long, not a panicked one.
