The Russian authorities gained access to the data of Russians on the movement of cryptocurrencies. This is evidenced by the speech of the head of Rosfinmonitoring Yuri Chikhanchin during a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Interfax reports .

Chikhanchin told the president that his department sees transfers and transactions of trading platforms, and the transactions themselves are far from always carried out exclusively for investments or exchange speculation, often crypto assets are used to withdraw funds or finance illegal activities.

“And only on two foreign sites, two exchanges, several hundred thousand Russian citizens participate in transactions worth tens of billions. And we see that there are not only calculations, not only speculative transactions, but this is drug trafficking, financing of terrorism and extremism, and cybercrime, and so on,” the official said.

The head of Rosfinmonitoring also told Putin that his department, together with the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the FSB, is already conducting about 400 financial investigations into suspicious transactions, more than 20 criminal cases have already been initiated. Chikhanchin also said that the Transparent Blockchain project, which was allegedly supported by the head of state, is helping in the search for criminal cryptocurrency. In fact, the president was not aware of the "Transparent Blockchain", and the very concept of the president confused and baffled.

The Transparent Blockchain system was created specifically to monitor and track actions with cryptocurrency. In 2020, Rosfinmonitoring presented a prototype system based on artificial intelligence, it was assumed that exchanges and trading platforms would integrate them into their work, and the Ministry of Finance or the Central Bank would receive supervisory authorities for the movement of funds. In 2021, Chikhanchin already boasted of the first criminal cases, but the trading platforms themselves did not report joining the system.

The cooperation of the largest crypto exchange Binance with the Russian authorities, up to the transfer of transaction data, was reported by Reuters. It was, in particular, about transfers in favor of the opposition politician Alexei Navalny, but later Binance denied this information, noting that "cooperation with the Russian authorities does not differ from cooperation with other countries", the agency's statements were called false in the company.