jakiro
Author: Anita; Source: X, @Anitahityou
Winter mornings in Moscow always come slowly.
The subway slid from the gray residential area into the city center. The advertising screens in the carriages scrolled with ruble loans, online shopping promotions, and a normal-looking banner as usual:
“Overseas income settlement? USDT is also available.”
It’s hard to imagine that in a country besieged by the Western financial system, “stablecoin”, a term that originally only appeared in Silicon Valley white papers, has quietly become an infrastructure that ordinary people and companies truly rely on.
Alexei (pseudonym) is 34 years old and claims to be “an IT consultant”, but his true identity is a small node in a stable currency black market chain in Moscow.
At nine in the morning, his work begins by checking his Telegram channel.
There are four or five groups on the mobile phone, “Moscow USDT Circle Price”, “Freelancer Settlement Channel”, “Ruble Cash/Card Transfer · Acquaintances Only”
There are robot offers in each group – “Buy USDT 76.3, sell 77.1”. On a deeper level, there are dozens of private chat windows. There are young people doing outsourcing development, who want to change the US dollars called by customers from foreign cards to USDT, and then exchange them for rubles; there are small companies that import small parts and need to use USDT to pay Turkish suppliers; there are also unfamiliar numbers with accents who just say: “The amount is large, meet offline.”
Alexey’s way of making money is very simple. He earns a little bit of price difference through small-amount business, or charges a few thousandths of a “handling fee” for large-amount orders, and then connects a larger exchanger or exchange behind him.
All this may appear to be just “exchange of currency” on the surface, but the funds will soon flow into deeper undercurrents.
Some people deposit USDT into a local exchange with a friendly Russian interface, and then exchange it for Bitcoin to transfer it away. Some people use Russian platforms like Garantex to launder funds into offshore accounts, and some people use it to supplement liquidity for companies in Georgia and the United Arab Emirates.
At night, he would divide the USDT he earned that day into two parts. One part would be sold into rubles to pay the mortgage and buy groceries. The other part would lie quietly in a multi-signature wallet until the situation changes one day. It may be the last insurance for his family.On the stat sheet, he is just a blip on “Russian retail crypto inflows.”
But the line connecting all these points is the invisible market.
1. After being cut off, new blood vessels grow underground
Russia’s encryption story did not begin after sanctions.
In 2020, Eastern Europe was already “one of the regions with the highest crime-related crypto trading volumes” in the world.Chainalysis research shows that the darknet received a record $1.7 billion in cryptocurrency that year, most of which went to one name: Hydra.Hydra is by far the largest darknet market in the world, accounting for 75% of global darknet market revenue at its peak.
Before it was taken down by the German police in April 2022, it was actually a huge “dark economy center”-drugs, fake documents, money laundering services, biometric data, all “transactions not recognized by the official world” were settled in stablecoins.
The fall of Hydra did not make the chain disappear, but only redistributed the shadow: its users, infrastructure, intermediary network, and later regrouped among Garantex, Telegram OTC, small exchanges.
The dark side of Russia’s crypto-economy did not appear only after sanctions. It has a deep historical foundation.
Since the outbreak of the Russo-Ukrainian war in 2022 and the comprehensive escalation of sanctions, Russia has been besieged at all levels in the financial world in the traditional sense: foreign exchange reserves have been frozen, major banks have been excluded from SWIFT, and Visa and Mastercard have collectively withdrawn.For a country whose life depends on energy and commodity exports, this is almost like having its neck tightened.
But the numbers on the chain tell another story:
According to Chainalysis’ statistics on European crypto activity from July 2024 to June 2025, Russia received $376.3 billion in equivalent crypto assets during this period, firmly ranking first in Europe and far ahead of the United Kingdom’s $273.2 billion.
Russia is no longer an invisible player in Bitcoin mining.The latest estimates from hashrate data platform Hashrate Index show that Russia will account for approximately 16% of global Bitcoin hashing power by the end of 2024 – second only to the United States.
These two numbers are cold, but they are enough to illustrate:
As the world attempts to push Russia out of the traditional financial system, a new, underground crypto-economy is growing rapidly.
If OTC traders like Alexey are the capillaries, then local exchanges like Garantex are the heart of the black market.
Garantex was first registered in Estonia, but its business focus has always been in Moscow.Starting in 2022, it has been successively included in the sanctions list by the U.S. Treasury Department and the European Union, and is accused of facilitating ransomware, darknet transactions, and sanctioned banks.
It stands to reason that such a platform should have been “completely dead” long ago.However, in September 2025, a report disclosed by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) showed that despite multiple rounds of crackdowns, Garantex actually “continues to operate in the shadows” and provides crypto exchange and transfer services to customers in Russia and surrounding areas through a series of offshore companies, mirror sites and agency accounts.
Even more glaringly, an in-depth report from on-chain analytics company TRM Labs states that in 2025, Garantex and Iranian exchange Nobitex together contributed more than 85% of crypto funds flowing into sanctioned entities and jurisdictions.
In March 2025, Tether froze USDT wallets related to Garantex worth approximately $280,000 (approximately 2.5 billion rubles), and the exchange was forced to announce a suspension of operations.But a few months later, the U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned a new name: Grinex — a “cryptocurrency exchange created by Garantex employees to assist in circumventing sanctions.”
The black heart was punched and started beating in a new form.
2. A7A5: The ambition and paradox of “Ruble on the chain”
USDT is the current protagonist of Russia’s shadow economy, but in the eyes of Moscow officials, it also has a fatal problem—it is too “American” and too “centralized.”
In 2025, a new chess piece was quietly pushed onto the table:A7A5, a stable currency issued by the Kyrgyzstan platform and known as the “Ruble-pegged”.
The British Financial Times disclosed in an investigation that A7A5 completed approximately US$6 billion to US$8 billion worth of transactions in four months, most of which occurred on working days and concentrated during the Moscow trading hours. The custodian bank behind it was Russia’s sanctioned defense bank Promsvyazbank.
The EU and UK sanctions documents simply describe it as “Russia’s tool to circumvent sanctions.”By October 2025, the European Union officially included A7A5 on the sanctions list, and on-chain analysis companies also pointed out that it has close coupling with Garantex and Grinex – becoming a new central node in the Russian crypto clearing network.
A7A5 plays a very subtle role:
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For Russian companies, it is a “ruble stable currency that can bypass the risks of USDT”;
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For regulators, it is an “invisible tool to put rubles on the chain and bypass bank scrutiny.”
Behind this is an increasingly clear idea in Russia: “Since we cannot do without stablecoins, at least some of them must be printed by ourselves.”
The paradox is that any stablecoin that wants to go global must rely on infrastructure that Russia cannot control: public blockchains, cross-border nodes, overseas exchanges, and third-country financial systems.
A7A5 wants to be a “sovereign stablecoin”, but it has to circulate in a world that Russia does not control.This is the epitome of Russia’s entire encryption strategy—It wants to get rid of Western finance, but it has to continue to use the “on-chain financial building blocks” built by the West.
3. What does encryption mean for Russia?Not the future, but now
The Western world tends to view crypto as an asset, a technology, and even a culture.But in Russia it plays a completely different role:
1. For businesses: Crypto is an alternative channel for trade settlement
Russia imports high-tech parts, drone components, industrial instruments, and even consumer goods, many of which cannot be paid through the traditional banking system.As a result, a secret but stable route was formed: Russian companies exported to the Middle East/Central Asia intermediaries, then circulated to suppliers through USDT/USDC, and then returned to Moscow OTC to be exchanged for rubles.
It is not clever, not romantic, and not “decentralized,” but it is usable, dynamic, and alive.
Encryption is not a dream here, it is the least efficient but the only realism that can move.
2. For young people, crypto is an escape from local currency
The chronic lack of trust in the Russian banking system and the ruble’s fragile performance for many years have made crypto the most natural asset haven for the middle class and young engineers.
If you ask a Moscow software engineer, what he will tell you may not be “I speculate in coins”, but “I convert my salary into USDT and put it with Telegram’s trusted OTC team. The bank freezes the card, but the chain will not freeze me.”
This sentence epitomizes contemporary Russia.
3. For the country, encryption and mining are “digital energy exports”
Russia has one of the cheapest electricity in the world – Siberia’s hydropower and natural gas surplus power has become a paradise for Bitcoin mining.
Mining provides: an “export product” that does not go through the banking system, a digital commodity that can be exchanged globally, and a way to circumvent financial blockades.
The Russian Ministry of Finance has officially admitted on many occasions that “mining revenue is a necessary component of the country’s trading system.”
This is no longer a civilian activity, but a quasi-state economic sector.
4. For gray systems: Encryption is the invisible lubricant
This part is difficult to quantify, but the facts include European intelligence agencies pointing out that Russian intelligence agencies use encryption to pay for information warfare and hacker operations, large-scale underground funds are shuttled between Europe and Russia with the help of stable coins, and various smuggling networks are highly dependent on on-chain capital tracks.
4. Is Russia an “encryption power”?The answer is more complicated than imagined
If you measure it by technological innovation, no.
If you look at it with VC projects and DeFi, it’s not either.
If you measure it by mining, on-chain transaction volume, stablecoin inflows, and trade settlement dependence, it is a center of crypto power that the world cannot ignore.
It is not “voluntary becoming” but “being pushed to become by the world.”
