FT: Ruble Stablecoin A7A5 Moved $6 Billion in Transactions After US Sanctions

At least $6 billion in transactions passed through the ruble-pegged stablecoin A7A5 in the two months from August 2025 - despite United States sanctions against structures linked to the token, Forbes Russia reported, citing the blockchain-data analysis by the Financial Times. In the newspaper's assessment, this shows that the West's ability to constrain Russia's financial flows is not unlimited.

What A7A5 is and who issues it

A7A5 is a stablecoin backed by ruble deposits at PSB (formerly Promsvyazbank), a bank itself under United States, United Kingdom and European Union sanctions. Each token is denominated at one ruble. Issuance is handled by Old Vector, a company registered in Kyrgyzstan; on the issuer's website A7A5 is presented as "the first digital ruble issued under the legislation of Kyrgyzstan and backed by deposits in reliable banks".

The FT had flagged the token's turnover back in June 2025: by that point $9.3 billion had passed through A7A5 over several months, most of it via the Kyrgyz crypto exchange Grinex.

Sanctions and the token burn

The US Treasury added Grinex to its sanctions list on August 14, 2025, together with Old Vector, the issuer of A7A5, and the companies A7, A71 and A7 Agent. Washington considers Grinex the successor to Garantex, which had been under US sanctions since 2022 and was liquidated in March 2025: in the American authorities' version, Grinex was created by former Garantex staff to evade the restrictions, and A7A5 serves as a circumvention tool. A month earlier, in July 2025, the European Union sanctioned company A7 as a structure linked to businessman Ilan Shor from Moldova. The A7A5 token itself never entered the sanctions lists.

• on August 15, 2025, the day after the US Treasury announcement, the contents of two wallets linked to the crypto exchange were deleted - 33.8 billion tokens with an estimated value of $405 million;
• the balances were zeroed with the destroyBlackFunds command, which marked the tokens as "dirty shares" (dirtyShares);
• soon afterwards tokens of the same amount were created anew in a new wallet - effectively "moved and cleaned";
• more than 80% of the entire A7A5 issuance went through this procedure: the on-chain link between the old and new wallets is severed, making the tokens' origin harder to trace.

The FT estimated transaction volume through the new wallet from August 2025 at $6.1 billion, noting that operations run during Moscow business hours. Grinex denies any connection to Garantex, yet analysts interviewed by Forbes pointed to coincidences, including in registration data, that suggest a possible link between the two exchanges.

The offline geography is telling as well: the A7A5 chatbot offers to buy tokens for cash through Grinex's over-the-counter desk, "located in Federation Tower, 14th floor" - the same floor in Moscow City where Garantex's office used to sit. The exchange's own chatbot lists a different Moscow address, the Imperia Tower.

From token to payment infrastructure

The A7 payment network is expanding rapidly, largely on the back of loans from Russian state structures, the British research group Centre for Information Resilience (CIR) argues in its report. In the researchers' view, its importance as a tool helping Russian authorities support exports will keep growing.

In September 2025, Vladimir Putin opened the Far Eastern International Financial and Settlement Centre on the basis of A7 infrastructure during the Eastern Economic Forum. Ilan Shor told Kommersant in an interview that the platform allows international transactions to be conducted "quickly and safely": over nine months the payment volume through A7 infrastructure exceeded 7 trillion rubles, and the client base reached 10,000 - major importers and exporters. The same month A7 started work in Africa, opening representative offices in Zimbabwe and Nigeria.

Digital financial asset status

At the end of September 2025, A7A5 obtained the status of a digital financial asset. This means Russian importers and exporters can officially use the token as a means of payment for cross-border settlements: the ruble stablecoin steps out of the grey zone of crypto exchanges into a regulated perimeter.

For the market this is a notable signal: sanctions pressure did not stop the ruble token's turnover but, in Ilan Shor's own wording, became a "stimulus and impulse" for building a product in demand well beyond the pressure zone. Whether Western regulators can close the remaining gaps in on-chain tracing is a question for the coming quarters.