Bitcoin miners in Moscow have been ordered to power down their machines — and this is no temporary pause. Crypto mining is barred in the city, the wider Moscow Region and parts of Kursk all the way through Dec. 31, 2032.
Seven years of exclusion, in the capital of a nation that generated an estimated 175 exahashes per second during the first quarter — 16.4% of Bitcoin’s worldwide computing power, a share beaten only by the U.S.
The open question is what portion of that hashrate was actually located inside the freshly restricted territory. No one has released that breakdown, and the decree itself offers no such detail.
Pools fall under the ban as well
Government decree No. 936 reaches beyond the rigs themselves. Taking part in crypto mining pools is prohibited too, sealing off the obvious loophole of aiming hardware at a pool from within a restricted address.
Local media reports say the document was signed on July 25 and made public on July 31.
The electricity arithmetic driving the decision
According to Russia’s Energy Ministry, a restriction lasting all year was required to lower the risk of power-capacity shortfalls as energy-hungry mining sites hook into regional grids.
One figure tells the story. Roughly 1 gigawatt of the Moscow power system currently goes to mining. Interfax reported after the initial signing that the region’s data-center capacity may climb to 3.6 GW by 2032 — equal to 17% of peak demand.
A 17% slice of peak demand is no rounding error. That is the scale of load that pushes a utility toward a binary choice: build more generation, or tell someone to unplug. Moscow went with the latter.
More than an energy question
What lifts this above ordinary grid management is the sanctions dimension attached to Russian mining.
In December 2024, Finance Minister Anton Siluanov noted that Russian firms had been putting domestically mined bitcoin to work in international payments, following legal changes crafted to counter Western restrictions.
Parliament’s July legislation left the domestic crypto payments ban untouched, yet retained carve-outs for foreign-trade settlements and dealings involving mined cryptocurrency. As sanctions tighten around conventional payment rails, that mechanism remains on the table.
Washington saw this coming years ago
Back in 2022, the U.S. Treasury hit BitRiver and 10 subsidiaries with sanctions, arguing that Russian mining firms were helping the country monetize its energy resources and could blunt the impact of sanctions.
The upshot: the activity Moscow is now reining in domestically is the same activity Washington targeted three years prior — though for entirely different motives. To one, it’s a liability on the grid. To the other, it’s a release valve for sanctions.
A pattern rather than an isolated move
Registered crypto mining was legalized in Russia back in 2024. The activity was subsequently banned across 10 regions through March 2031, with electricity demand given as the reason.
Southern Irkutsk, along with most of Buryatia and Zabaykalsky Krai, later saw year-round restrictions applied as well. Moscow’s decree follows the identical template: sanction the industry at the national level, then cut out the areas whose grids cannot handle it.
The signals worth following
For anyone monitoring Russian hashrate, the ban itself isn’t the meaningful indicator. What matters is whether that 16.4% share of global computing power survives the next quarterly reading, or erodes as capital migrates toward regions with electricity to spare.
Keep an eye on the pool participation clause as well. Banning rigs is something you can enforce at the substation. Banning pools works only if someone is prepared to investigate who is hashing from where — a considerably tougher assignment than checking a meter.
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