George TsagkarakisTwo Russian retailers reported the same thing this year: people are buying hardware wallets faster than they were a few months ago. M.Video said unit sales on its marketplace rose 107% in the second quarter compared with the first. Sales by value rose 92% over the same stretch.
That gap between the two figures matters more than the headline number. Units grew faster than revenue, which points to buyers moving toward cheaper devices rather than spending more per purchase.
M.Video didn’t disclose how many devices it actually sold.
The second retailer measured something different
Wildberries also saw demand climb. Unit sales rose 84% in the first half compared with a year earlier, RIA Novosti reported, citing RWB, the marketplace’s parent company. Sales value rose 60% over the period.
Read those two data sets carefully before stacking them together. M.Video compared Q2 against Q1. Wildberries compared H1 2026 against H1 2025. Different baselines, different windows.
Neither company released unit totals. So the percentages are all anyone outside those firms has to work with, and a 107% jump off an undisclosed base could mean a lot of devices or very few.
What a hardware wallet actually does for you
The device holds the private keys that control your crypto, on dedicated hardware, rather than parking them with an internet-connected service. That’s the whole pitch. Fewer places for someone to reach your keys remotely.
It’s a narrow benefit, not a shield against everything. Which the past few weeks made clear.
The Coldcard flaw cost more than $116 million
Coinkite disclosed a Coldcard firmware flaw on July 30 that weakened seed generation. Estimated losses topped $116 million.
That’s the risk buyers in Russia are taking on alongside the benefit. A hardware wallet moves your trust from an exchange’s security team to a firmware vendor’s. It doesn’t eliminate the need to trust somebody.
The rules are the obvious driver here
Russian law doesn’t ban non-custodial wallets or treat them as illegal, lawyers told RBC. What it does bar is withdrawals from Russian digital depositories to personal wallets. A transition period runs until July 1, 2027.
After that date, crypto transactions must go through regulated entities. Banks must refuse to process transactions outside that framework.
And the broader regime lands sooner than 2027. Russia’s crypto framework takes effect Sept. 1, which puts the sales surge squarely in front of it.
What the Sept. 1 framework allows
The framework will permit regulated exchanges and digital depositories, according to the Bank of Russia. Some retail investors will be able to buy liquid cryptocurrencies after testing, within a 300,000-ruble annual cap per intermediary.
The ban on domestic crypto payments stays. So the legal path forward is buying and holding through approved channels, not spending.
Put the cap next to the wallet purchases and the behavior reads plainly enough. A 300,000-ruble ceiling per intermediary is a limit on what you can acquire through the regulated route, and a device that holds keys outside that route is what people appear to be buying ahead of the deadline.
What to make of the numbers
Two retailers, two incompatible measurement periods, zero unit totals. That’s thin evidence for a trend, and it’s worth holding the 107% and the 84% loosely.
But the direction is consistent across both, and the calendar explains it without much reaching. If you’re weighing one of these devices yourself, the Coldcard disclosure is the more useful thing to read than the sales figures. Losses over $116 million from a seed generation flaw is the specific failure mode worth understanding before you move keys onto any device, in Russia or anywhere else.
