Ruble-pegged stablecoin issued by Kyrgyzstan-registered Old Vector and used by Russia's A7 payments network for cross-border settlement and sanctions evasion.
Three senior Russian officials, including the finance minister, joined A7's board two weeks after OFAC's criminal designation, Cryptopolitan reports. The seats confirm a state link A7 already had, so open exposure sits with the intermediaries around it.
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A7A5 stablecoin transfers fell to 14 a day on Tron and 18 on Ethereum after Ukrainian drones struck Yandex data centers. Elliptic's Tom Robinson ties the two, though the issuer's own explanation so far is technical problems.
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Russia's A7 will settle foreign invoices in USDT for a flat 0.3% fee, with recipients paid by SWIFT, 11 days after US sanctions on its network. It is aimed at businesses in international trade, the segment where US authorities say the network moved restricted payments.
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Britain sanctioned three crypto exchanges and two payment platforms on Oct. 8, two of them suspected of handling transactions for Russia's A7 network. Washington blocked A7 a week earlier and Brussels barred dealings with 14 crypto platforms in July, so firms near these rails now answer to three overlapping regimes.
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OFAC designated A7, a Russia-linked payments network that reportedly settled over $86 billion in its first year, a transnational criminal organization. FinCEN's same-day proposal to bar transfers through A7's sub-agents gives banks and crypto firms a new screening job aimed at intermediaries.
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Leaked files put $6.9 billion of the Kremlin-linked A7 network's money through correspondent banks, while TRM counts $166 billion of A7-linked crypto volume. After the sanctions, the daily turnover of its ruble token fell 96%.
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Chainalysis logged a 420% rise in onchain malware writes for its 2026 crime report, and says suspected Iranian operators ran their update channel through a permanent public Bitcoin address nobody can take offline.
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