Paz Gomez, a cryptocurrency expert, says the A7A5 stablecoin is mainly traded through Uniswap, a decentralized exchange that is invulnerable to sanctions.
In January 2025, a company run by Moldovan billionaire Ilan Shor and Russian state-owned bank Promsvyazbank (PSB) launched A7A5, the world’s first ruble-pegged stablecoin.
By July 2025, blockchain research company Elliptic said funds moved through A7A5 had surged past the $40 billion mark, and earlier this month cryptocurrency news website CoinDesk said the figure had reached $90 billion, despite sanctions on both PSB and Shor’s payments firm A7 LLC.
Experts say the increasing use of A7A5 is allowing Russia to evade sanctions with greater ease, and is setting up a parallel economic system that allows the Kremlin and its associates to operate in the shadows.
“A7A5 is apparently gaining traction among Russian companies that conduct cross-border transactions and aim to avoid sanctions imposed by the European Union and the United States,” Paz Gomez, an Ecuador-based analyst with EconAmericas and author of “When Crypto Makes Sense,” told The Epoch Times.
“The $90 billion figure is huge but at the same time consistent with Russia’s systematic pivot to cryptocurrency for procurement,” a spokesman for Dallas, a private analytics and reconnaissance company that exposes companies that help Moscow evade sanctions, told The Epoch Times.
Decentralized Exchanges Key
“For importers bringing goods into Russia, the primary sanctions evasion case is to convert rubles into A7A5 and then into USDT on decentralized exchanges,” he said. “Foreign suppliers may not know the payment originated in Russia. For exporters selling Russian goods abroad, the scheme helps repatriate funds when traditional banking channels are severely restricted.”
He said PSB bank is responsible for paying the salaries of Russian soldiers in Ukraine, and the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) said in January 2025 that PSB had “issued billions of dollars of financial support for Russian military-industrial base companies.”
All other stablecoin—such as Tether (USDT) and USDC—are pegged to the dollar, but A7A5 is pegged to the Russian ruble.
The token, which was created by Kyrgyzstan-based Old Vector LLC, is circulated on the Tron and Ethereum blockchains.
“A Russian-backed stablecoin is still just a stablecoin pegged to something,” said Michael Litman, cryptocurrency expert and founder of Cultural Capital Labs in London. “The peg target can be U.S. dollars, euros, gold, or, in this case, the Russian ruble.”
What matters is not the currency itself, said Litman, but who is holding the reserves and what users want to do with the stablecoin.
‘Higher Geopolitical Risk’
“A ruble-pegged stablecoin is not useless but it comes with higher currency risk, higher geopolitical risk, and lower global liquidity,” said Litman, who said fewer cryptocurrency exchanges were likely to support it compared with dollar-pegged stablecoin.
Litman said there would also be more “trust issues” surrounding custody.
“So it matters because it changes the nature of the risk you’re exposed to,” he said.
“A7A5 is mainly traded through Uniswap—a decentralized exchange—with a typical daily transfer volume of around US$250 million,” said Gomez.
In July 2025, McKinsey estimated, daily transactions in stablecoins amount to around $30 billion per day.
Gomez said that means A7A5 only accounts for 1 percent of stablecoin transactions.
“A7A5 expanded its total circulating supply more aggressively than both major dollar-backed stablecoins USDT and USDC combined,” said the Dallas spokesman, “meaning Russia’s ruble stablecoin was being issued and distributed into the market at an unprecedented rate compared to the market leaders. This suggests coordinated, large-scale institutional adoption by Russian entities.”
Gomez said there appears to be no limit to the supply of A7A5.
“The bank and the company behind the A7A5 token have the authority to continue issuing more and more money. So this is very important, and could be dangerous if this gets traction, because it’s like a free inflationary policy inside this stable coin,” she said.
The token is not designed to challenge dollar-pegged stablecoins, but simply to help out the Kremlin and its allies, said Gomez, who points out that, unlike other stablecoins, A7A5 transactions are made predominantly during weekdays, suggesting they are used by corporations and institutions, rather than by individuals or investors.
“U.S. dollar stablecoins target a broad global market. In contrast, A7A5 serves a niche of individuals and companies operating in Russia or interacting with Russian companies that have been targeted by financial sanctions,” she said.
In August, OFAC sanctioned cryptocurrency exchange Garantex and six associated companies in Russia and Kyrgyzstan, including Old Vector, which was also sanctioned by the British government a week later.
“If the Kremlin thinks they can hide their desperate attempts to soften the blow of our sanctions by laundering transactions through dodgy crypto networks, they are sorely mistaken,” British government minister Stephen Doughty said on Aug. 20, 2025.
But such sanctions may be ineffective, say experts.
“Ruble-pegged stablecoins eliminate Moscow’s vulnerability to asset freezes that plague dollar-pegged alternatives,” said the Dallas spokesman, “When Russia relied on USDT through exchanges like Garantex, Western authorities could collaborate with Tether to freeze funds–in March 2025, approximately $28 million in Garantex-linked USDT was frozen following coordinated law enforcement action by the U.S. Secret Service with Europol.”
“Additionally, the ruble peg allows Russian entities to convert domestic currency directly into blockchain-transferable assets without first acquiring sanctioned dollars.”
Who is Ilan Shor?
OFAC said representatives of Israel-born Shor, who now lives in Moscow, had met with officers from Garantex to establish the trading of the A7A5 stablecoin on the exchange.
In 2023, Shor was jailed in absentia for 15 years on fraud charges after being convicted of taking $1 billion from banks in Moldova, a former Soviet republic.
In October 2024 he offered $29 to any Moldovan who voted in a referendum against the country joining the European Union.
On July 15, 2025, the European Union sanctioned his company, A7.
A7 is “a Russian firm that provides cross-border settlement platforms used for sanctions evasion,” says OFAC.
“A ruble stablecoin has obviously a lot more risk than the U.S.-based stablecoin,” Alex Shipkevich, a fintech attorney and special professor of law at Hofstra Law School in New York, told The Epoch Times.
“But the ultimate question is, who’s essentially backing up the stablecoin? Because you need to have reserves,” said Shipkevich, who said the flip side was that if the Russian government ultimately backed A7A5—and they have a lot of money—then it might be a good investment for those untroubled by the war in Ukraine or the risk of sanctions.
While Russia has launched a ruble-pegged stablecoin, the Chinese communist regime in Beijing is putting its confidence in a digital renminbi, which it launched in 2022.
But Gomez said a lot of people in China use dollar-based cryptocurrencies to circumvent the controls imposed by the Chinese regime.
