Alexander Lorenzo breaks down how a ruble-pegged stablecoin called A7A5 moved roughly $93 billion through crypto to fund Russian drone components used against Ukraine, plus similar flows from Iran and North Korea. Chainalysis' 2026 report details how sanctioned actors swap into Tether without identity checks, and what the EU and U.S. are doing about it.
So you're telling me that $93 billion was moved through a stablecoin that nobody's heard of, and it's being used to fund drones that are attacking Ukraine right now as we speak? Russia's government is exploiting a stablecoin backdoor to move $93 billion through a shadow dollar system that nobody can control. We see many countries doing this, but what makes it different is they just got exposed for funding a war machine to pull it off. So Chainalysis just dropped their 2026 Crypto Crime Report, and sanction evasions shot up 694% in one year. This means that countries are literally finding ways around financial restrictions from the United States to basically do whatever they want, and they're doing it all through crypto. Now, I've been in crypto for a long time, and nobody has ever talked about this stablecoin called A7A5. This stablecoin is a ruble-pegged crypto created by a company called A7 and backed by a sanctioned Russian military bank run out of Moscow's Federation Tower. This isn't some random crypto project. It's backed by the same people who runs Russia's war budget. Here's exactly how it works. Russian businesses are locked out of SWIFT, locked out of pretty much global banking. So they built their own payment rail and they use blockchain. So a Russian company will basically convert rubles into A7A5, which is a cryptocurrency, the stablecoin, right? And it's regulated in Kyrgyzstan and they instantly swap it to Tether on exchanges with no identity checks, no KYC. The money hits the global system clean. So there's rubles in and clean dollars out to be used for whatever. That's $93.3 billion in less than 12 months. It's only getting worse. Foreign Policy just exposed that these flows are being routed to buy military parts. These components are being used against Ukraine right now, and it happens to be that drone parts— of course, drones are one of the most important attack vectors in all of war right now. And Reuters confirmed it: Chainalysis matched crypto transactions directly to drone price points on e-commerce platforms. If you guys understand how blockchain works, it's fully open and transparent. You can see every transaction if you have the right software and the right knowledge. So the same blockchain that's running it is also recording it. And Russia isn't alone. Iran's Revolutionary Guard moved over $3 billion to Through crypto last year. Then obviously we had North Korean hackers stealing a whole bunch of money on the blockchain as well. TRM Labs said total illicit crypto hit $158 billion. The A7 network alone was $56 billion. That's more than the GDP of 100 countries. So now we have the EU trying to ban all crypto transaction with Russian entities because of this. Everybody misses this with blockchain. The same transparency that lets them move money is the same thing that exposes them. Every A7, A5 transaction is actually traceable. The weapon and the weakness are the same technology. That's why the United States is not banning crypto. They're weaponizing it. And that's also why they're going to pass the Clarity Act. Russia moved $93 billion through a stablecoin no one's heard of, funding a war, bought by military parts open on the internet. Of course they want to get ahead of it. And it still blows my mind that people think crypto is a scam. The truth is crypto is so technologically advanced that countries that are blocked out of the banking system are using it to bypass it because it's a superior technology. They're allowed to do this. We need the entire world to adopt it so that we can block them in another way.
