Russia’s finance ministry and central bank are reportedly planning to launch a crypto exchange for qualified investors under an experimental legal regime.

The platform will be aimed at “super-qualified investors,” Finance Minister Anton Siluanov said during a ministry meeting, according to April 23 reports from Russian media group RBC and Russian news agency Interfax.

“Together with the central bank, we will launch a crypto exchange for super-qualified investors. Crypto assets will be legalized, and crypto operations will be brought out of the shadows,” he said in a statement translated from Russian.

“Naturally, this will not happen domestically, but as part of the operations permitted under the experimental legal regime.”

Anton Siluanov (left) said the Kremlin-backed crypto exchange is only for Russian investors who meet certain income and wealth thresholds. Source: Mehmet Simsek

The Russian central bank announced a proposal on March 12 to allow a limited number of Russian investors with a certain amount of assets to buy and sell cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin (BTC) under a three-year experimental regime.

Under the proposal, the bank created a new investor category, super-qualified investors, defined by wealth and income thresholds of over 100 million rubles ($1.2 million) or a yearly income of at least 50 million rubles ($602,000).

Super-qualified investor definition not set in stone 

The deputy director of the Finance Ministry’s financial policy department, Osman Kabaloev, said the criteria for a super-qualified investor are not yet final because they were floated in the early stages of discussions last year, according to RBC.

“Perhaps it will be in this format, or these indicators will be somehow adjusted in one direction or another – this is possible, I think there will be a wide range of discussions,” Kabaloev said in a statement translated from Russian.

Russia implemented a ban on using cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin for payments under its first crypto law, On Digital Financial Assets, which came into force in January 2021.

However, the country has since been trying to make other crypto inroads. On April 16, Kabaloev said the Kremlin should be creating its own stablecoin after a recent freeze on wallets linked to the sanctioned Russian exchange Garantex by US authorities and stablecoin issuer Tether. 

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Meanwhile, Evgeny Masharov, a member of the Russian Civic Chamber, proposed on March 20 to create a Russian government crypto fund that would include assets confiscated from criminal proceedings.

At the same time, other officials were progressing with new legislation on recognizing crypto as property for the purposes of criminal procedure legislation.

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The ZKsync Association has confirmed the recovery of $5 million worth of stolen tokens from an April 15 ZKsync security incident involving its airdrop distribution contract.

The hacker agreed to accept a 10% bounty and return 90% of the remaining stolen tokens, transferring the ZKsync Security Council almost $5.7 million across three transfers on April 23.

“We’re pleased to share that the hacker has cooperated and returned the funds within the safe harbor deadline,” ZKsync Association posted to X on April 23, which was later reposted by ZKsync’s X account.

Matter Labs, the company behind the ZKsync protocol, also reposted the news shared on X.

The ZKsync X account previously confirmed that no user funds were compromised.

Source: ZKsync Association

The hacker sent two transfers on the ZKsync Era blockchain, consisting of $2.47 million worth of ZKsync (ZK) tokens and $1.83 million worth of Ether (ETH) to the ZKsync Security Council’s ZKsync Era address.

Another 776 ETH worth nearly $1.4 million was also sent to their security council’s Ethereum address, Etherscan data shows.

The first transfer was made on April 23 at 2:39:57 pm UTC on and the last transfer was made roughly 13 minutes later — all within the 72-hour window that ZK Sync had initially set.

ZKsync Association said the company would publish a final report revealing more details from the security incident.

How the hack happened

The hacker breached ZKsync’s admin account, allowing them to exploit the airdrop distribution contract’s sweepUnclaimed() function to mint 111 million unclaimed ZK tokens, worth approximately $5 million at the time of the April 15 attack.

The hack occurred while ZKsync was in the process of airdropping 17.5% of ZK’s token supply to ecosystem participants.

The recovered amount — almost $5.7 million — exceeded the $5 million originally stolen due to a rise in the market value of the stolen tokens, with ZK and ETH increasing 16.6% and 8.8% respectively since the April 15 attack, according to CoinGecko data.

Despite the asset recovery, the ZK token failed to rise substantially on the news and is currently down 0.2% over the last 24 hours.

ZKsync Era is an Ethereum layer 2 solution that uses zero-knowledge rollups to batch and process transactions offchain. It has nearly $59 million in total value locked on its chain and has over $2 billion in real-world assets onchain, according to DefiLlama and RWA.xyz.

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Cryptocurrency exchange KuCoin is set to branch further into Southeast Asia, targeting the growing crypto market in Thailand. 

KuCoin is planning to launch a crypto exchange platform offering digital assets and related products in the country, according to an April 23 announcement. 

ERX Company Ltd, Thailand’s first Securities and Exchange Commission-supervised digital token exchange, has rebranded as KuCoin Thailand effective April 22, it stated. 

The crypto exchange will operate under ERX, which recently received a crypto exchange license from the Thai financial regulator. 

“We’re strengthening our ability to offer localized solutions tailored to the Thai market,” said ERX chief executive Att Tongyai Asavanund.

Existing ERX users have been migrated to the new KuCoin Thailand platform, and the KuCoin TH app is available on both Android and iOS. 

KuCoin joins an increasingly crowded Thai market 

KuCoin is entering a crowded market, as there are eight other companies licensed by the Thai SEC to operate as crypto and digital asset exchanges.

These are the WAAN Exchange, Gulf Binance, Thai Digital Assets Exchange, InnovestX Securities, GMO-Z.com Cryptonomics, Upbit Exchange, Bitkub Online and Orbix Trade.

Bitkub is the largest by far and has a current daily trading volume of around $70 million, according to CoinGecko. Comparatively, KuCoin’s global platform claims to have $3.8 billion in daily volume. 

Related: Thailand SEC plans to launch tokenized securities trading system

In January, the Thai government announced a pilot program enabling tourists to pay using Bitcoin (BTC) in a sandboxed environment on the holiday island of Phuket. However, it has yet to be launched. 

While crypto trading remains popular in Thailand, using crypto assets for payments was outlawed by the central bank in 2022. 

In early April, Thai finance regulators targeted foreign peer-to-peer crypto platforms in their latest crackdown in an effort to combat scams and money laundering. 

KuCoin is currently trying to get a settlement with the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission resolved after it was sued under the previous administration in March 2024 for violating the Commodity Exchange Act. 

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