The $9.3B Stablecoin You've Never Heard Of--And Why It's Shaking Up Sanctions Compliance

A new stablecoin called A7A5 is catching attention for all the reasons that make compliance officers nervous. Since its February launch in Kyrgyzstan, the rouble-pegged token has facilitated $9.3 billion in flows on Grinex, a crypto exchange that barely existed six months ago. The coin is backed by rouble deposits at Promsvyazbank—a Russian defense lender under Western sanctions—and has ballooned to 12 billion tokens in circulation. While promoted as a financial bridge for Russian importers, blockchain analytics show that just 124 wallets are doing most of the heavy lifting, with activity heavily concentrated during Moscow office hours. It's not yet a mass-market product—it looks more like a tool built for a select club of users operating in the shadows of a fractured financial system.

The timing of A7A5's ascent isn't accidental. In March, U.S. authorities took down Garantex, a Russia-linked crypto exchange that had processed over $60 billion in transactions. In the weeks before the crackdown, large amounts of USDT were quietly swapped into A7A5—raising eyebrows among blockchain investigators. Analysts at Elliptic and Global Ledger now believe Grinex may be a rebranded successor to Garantex, even if the new platform denies any connection. The shared IP footprints, synchronized registration timelines, and social media footage showing A7A5 branding inside Garantex's old office all point to a coordinated handover. Grinex claims it only onboarded “non-toxic” users with transparent activity histories, but the scale and speed of A7A5's rise suggest something far more orchestrated.

Behind the scenes is Ilan Șor—the Moldovan oligarch convicted of stealing $1 billion and now living in Moscow. He's the majority owner of A7, the company that originally issued the token and was sanctioned by the UK in May. A7A5 says it severed ties with Șor's team last month, but forensic researchers at the Centre for Information Resilience say they found overlapping infrastructure between the stablecoin and Moldova-focused political influence networks. Șor has said the endgame is a multi-track payment system involving crypto, commodities, and securities to dodge politically vulnerable instruments. In short, the A7A5 project could be just one piece of a larger blueprint: a financial escape hatch for sanctioned Russian interests—packaged as a stablecoin, launched in a crypto-friendly corner of Central Asia, and quietly scaling under the radar.