In Russia and from Russia, it is illegal to use Bitcoin for paying for goods and services or for anything where Bitcoin would serve as a means of payment, except in cases where permission is personally granted by Putin.
Discussion
Yes, but you don’t pay for anything with bitcoin and the merchant never receives bitcoin. You give bitcoin to your friend (legal) and he pays for your coffee from his bank account (legal).
It’s 2025 and there’s still zero official bitcoin exchanges in Russia. Even Garantex, the one shut down by Tether’s actions, wasn’t Russian: it was based in Estonia and operated in Russia using a bunch of workarounds.
But p2p markets are flourishing and were never declared illegal.
Similarly, nobody *actually* pays with bitcoin for anything using Plati. It’s jot a “payment app” per se, it only appears as one. Under the hood, it’s a p2p market like many others but with its own twist.