Elliptic analysts are recording a sharp drop in A7A5 stablecoin activity as the project’s infrastructure loses access to the global market. Since the beginning of 2025, over $100 B has passed through A7A5 wallets. Created to bypass financial blockades, the network managed to gain momentum before being crushed by the crackdown from Western regulators.
The coin is issued by Old Vector LLC based in Kyrgyzstan, and the developer is the Russian firm A7 LLC. Beneficiaries include Ilan Shor and Promsvyazbank. The scheme is designed as a buffer: businesses use A7A5 for instant entry into USDT, avoiding prolonged holding of funds in dollar-pegged coins. This reduces the risk of freezes by the Tether issuer, as happened with Garantex reserves.
Despite a massive start, the project is now isolated. Elliptic co-founder Tom Robinson points out that the fatal event was the US sanctions introduced in August 2025. Immediately following this moment, liquidity provision for the USDT pair on the project’s decentralized exchange collapsed. The issuer, fearing a block on its Tether reserves, cut pool funding from $150 M per day to a minimum.
The European Union tightened the screws further: on October 23, Brussels officially added A7A5 to its sanctions list, classifying the asset as a tool for financing a war economy.
The network is currently stagnating. Uniswap has blocked the token on its interface, and centralized exchanges are freezing accounts flagged for interacting with A7A5 addresses.
The A7A5 case demonstrated the structural growth limit for alternative stablecoins. As long as the global economy is tied to the dollar, scaling such systems inevitably hits a wall when needing to bridge into USD assets, where compliance measures catch up with them. Robinson summarizes that as long as the dollar rules the market, the growth ceiling for such “sanctions” coins remains rigidly limited.
Users are forced to go offline: the project has launched physical promissory notes with security features to transport value across borders, attempting to preserve at least some market share outside of digital surveillance.
Read also:
- US Offers $6 Million for Help in Capturing Executives of Crypto Exchange Garantex
- Sanctioned Crypto Exchange Garantex Restarts Under the New Name Grinex
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