Three Russian Banks Now Building Parallel Crypto Custody Rails Ahead of Same 2026 Law

Russia now has three of its largest banking groups simultaneously building crypto custody infrastructure ahead of a single regulatory trigger, turning what looks like a compliance exercise into a first-mover race for retail deposit share. Alfa-Bank, the country’s largest private lender, has confirmed it is testing crypto trading services and building toward a full custody-and-brokerage stack, according to comments from COO Dmitry Vitman relayed to Russian outlets.

The setup: one law, three depositories

All three build-outs are gated on the same event: Russia’s draft law “On Digital Currency and Digital Rights,” which has cleared its first reading in the State Duma and is expected to take effect in September 2026. Alfa-Bank’s own launch timeline is explicitly tied to that date, with retail brokerage access targeted for late 2026 or early 2027.

Sberbank, the state-owned incumbent, has committed to a digital depository for crypto storage and accounting live by December 1, 2026 — a target that sits just weeks past the law’s effective date. Authorized crypto transactions there will be routed directly through the Sber app and SberInvestments, platforms that already carry tens of millions of active Russian users, giving Sberbank a distribution advantage regardless of who ships first.

T-Technologies Group, parent of T-Bank, has a separate depository build on the Atomize digital financial asset platform, with crypto sales executed through its T-Investments brokerage arm. That’s three separate custody stacks, three overlapping timelines, and one regulatory starting gun.

Alfa-Bank’s stack: custody first, brokerage second

Per Vitman, Alfa-Bank’s sequencing prioritizes its own digital depository first — a custody layer designed to be offered not only to retail clients but sold as a service to other companies, effectively positioning the bank as custody infrastructure for third parties rather than just an end-user broker. Retail brokerage access is planned as a second phase, built on a mix of domestic and international infrastructure.

Vitman also floated an ambition beyond custody: Russian-issued investment instruments built on open blockchains aimed at foreign capital. “It’s important for Russia to develop its own instruments; otherwise we’ll have nothing to offer,” he said, adding the country needs “to attract investors to our infrastructure, so we need to create products that can compete globally.” No specific chain or instrument has been named, but the framing suggests tokenized securities layered on top of the depository once operational.

What matters for flow tracking

For anyone tracking on-chain and institutional flow, the sequencing is the trade, not the announcements themselves. Whichever depository goes live first captures the initial retail deposit base and becomes the default on-ramp for Russian crypto flow — switching custodians later carries friction, so early share tends to stick.

With Sberbank targeting December 1, 2026, and Alfa-Bank and T-Bank clustering around the same September 2026 legislative window, all three platforms could reach production within months of each other. The metric worth watching once testing moves to live rails is deposit migration across these three custody stacks — and how much of it concentrates in Sberbank’s app-embedded distribution versus Alfa-Bank’s third-party custody-as-a-service model or T-Bank’s Atomize-based build.

Sources

• watcher.guru