Russian Ruble Stablecoin Continues to Grow Despite Western Sanctions: CertiK
The Russian ruble-backed A7A5 stablecoin continues to grow despite Western sanctions, with more than $110 billion in on-chain transactions, according to CertiK.
Certike said A7A5 accounted for 43 percent of the non-US dollar stablecoin market, and the number of holdings rose from 13,000 to 29,000 wallets between February 2025 and May 2026.
The security firm has linked A7A5 to Russian cross-border settlement companies as one of the clearest examples of the sanctions-evasion stablecoin ecosystem.
In the year Western sanctions on blockchain-based payment systems, including the EU's 19th Sanctions Package approved on October 23, 2025, which will ban transactions involving A7A5 from November 12. CertiK said the backup structure puts key assets directly outside the reach of Western enforcement.
A7A5 cumulative activity, all-time chart. Source: CertiK
The A7A5 was issued in January 2025 by the Kyrgyz subsidiary of Old Vector LLC on behalf of A7 LLC, a Russian transnational corporation jointly owned by Moldovan-Russian oligarch Ilan Shor and Russian state-owned defense sector lender Promsvyazbank.
Later, the Russian authorities recognized A7A5 in the country's digital financial asset framework.
The stablecoin traded $11.2 billion in A7A5/RUB and A7A5/USDT and $6.1 billion in A7A5/USDT trading, mainly through Greenex, the successor to Garantex, formerly Conti, Black Basta, LockBit, and various other illegitimates including North Korea-linked $20. It is a money laundering platform. The hack was sent to Garantex in February 2023.
The US Secret Service seized Gartex's domain in March 2025, but Tether blocked a Gartex-controlled wallet with nearly $28 million in USDT.
A7A5 is designed to provide some of USDT's stablecoin utility by keeping supply, reserves and frozen authorities outside of Western-controlled infrastructure.
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The creators of the ruble-backed stablecoin designed it without a centralized kill switch, meaning the smart contracts responsible for wallets and fund freezes are entirely under the control of Russian and Kyrgyz developers, according to Jonathan Rees, OSINT and Blockchain Intelligence Analyst at Certike.
The stable coin's reserves are kept in central Asian banking networks, especially in the banking system of Kyrgyzstan and Russia, which means that the currency is outside of Western sanctions.
A7A5 relies on a distributed distribution model for decentralized finance (DeFi) liquidity pools such as Curve and Uniswap to prevent it from being frozen by centralized exchanges, CertiK's Riss told Cointelegraph:
“While Western regulators cannot directly overwrite the Ethereum or Tron blockchains to destroy A7A5, the EU's 19th package and parallel US/UK measures target physical and digital chokepoints.”
The creators of the stablecoin designed A7A5 with careful consideration of the above three “defences” to escape the sanctions that crippled their previous escape strategies such as Tether USDT, Riss said.
A7A5 network chart. Source: CertiK
Shore owns 51% of A7 LLC as majority owner. In the year He served as a former member of the Moldovan parliament until he was convicted in a Moldovan court in 2014 of stealing around $1 billion from three Moldovan banks. In 2019, he fled Moldova and obtained Russian citizenship.
In the year He was sentenced in absentia to 15 years in prison in 2023. He currently lives in Moscow.
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