Russia has closed its capital to crypto mining for the next six years. Government Resolution No. 936, signed by Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin on July 25 and published July 31 on the country's official legal information portal, bars mining and participation in mining pools across the city of Moscow, the surrounding Moscow Oblast, eight districts of Kursk Oblast and the town of Lgov. It takes effect August 15 and runs to the end of 2032, amending Resolution No. 1869 from December 2024.
The justification is one gigawatt nobody has audited
Moscow Oblast energy minister Sergei Voropanov put crypto mining's draw on the Moscow power system at roughly one gigawatt. Officials expect data centre capacity around the capital to hit 3.6 GW by 2032, or about 17% of the system's maximum load. Work backwards from that ratio and the Moscow grid tops out somewhere near 21 GW. No hashrate figure appears anywhere in the decree, so the gigawatt is doing all of the argument's work.
Run the gigawatt through an actual miner
A modern fleet burns somewhere between 20 and 30 joules per terahash. One gigawatt buys roughly 33 to 50 exahashes per second.
| Fleet efficiency | Hashrate from 1 GW | Share of a 937 EH/s network |
|---|---|---|
| 20 J/TH | 50 EH/s | 5.3% |
| 25 J/TH | 40 EH/s | 4.3% |
| 30 J/TH | 33 EH/s | 3.6% |
CoinWarz put the live network estimate at 937 EH/s this week. Minerstat had it at 879 EH/s two days earlier, alongside a difficulty of 126.23 trillion. Across that band, Moscow's crypto mining load would be 3.5% to 5.7% of global Bitcoin production.
Set that against Russia's national number. Hashrate Index counted the country at 16.4% of global hashrate in January, or about 175 EH/s. Voropanov's estimate would place a fifth to a third of all Russian mining inside the one region with expensive retail power, no hydro and no Siberian winter to lean on. Either the ministry's gigawatt sweeps in ordinary data centres and unmetered capacity that never mined anything, or far more machinery surrounds Moscow than any tracker has counted.
Where the load goes after August 15
The pattern is two years old now. Ten North Caucasus regions sit under a ban running to March 2031, restrictions covering 20 districts of Buryatia and 31 of Zabaykalsky Krai took effect in April, and Russian lawmakers have separately pushed a bill to criminalise unregistered crypto mining. Moscow is the first name on that list that is also the financial centre, and the pools clause reaches beyond the hardware sitting in a warehouse.
Cheap power in Irkutsk and Siberia is where Russian mining went in the first place, and hosts there have absorbed displaced fleets before. The fight is for the buildings now, because miners keep converting sites to AI hosting and gigawatt-scale AI leases now outbid hashrate for the same megawatts. Regional shutdowns of crypto infrastructure have become ordinary elsewhere too, from Vietnam's fines starting September 1 to the week Minnesota's crypto kiosks went dark. The difficulty adjustments after August 15 will show whether a gigawatt really left the network or was never plugged into it.
