Mysterious Banners in the Moscow Metro: Who Is Putting the Russian Economy "On-Chain"?

Moscow winter mornings always arrive slowly. The subway glides from gray residential districts into the city center, and as usual, the advertising screens in the carriages scroll through ruble loans, online shopping promotions, and one banner that looks perfectly normal: "Overseas income settlement? USDT is also possible." It's hard to imagine that in a country blockaded by the Western financial system, the word "stablecoin," which once only appeared in Silicon Valley whitepapers, has quietly become essential infrastructure relied upon by ordinary people and businesses.

Aleksei (pseudonym), 34, claims to "work in IT consulting," but his real identity is as a small node in Moscow's black market stablecoin chain. At 9 a.m., his work begins by checking Telegram channels. There are four or five groups on his phone: "Moscow USDT Insider Price," "Freelancer Settlement Channel," "Ruble Cash Exchange/Card Transfer · For Acquaintances Only."

Each group has bots quoting prices—"Buy USDT at 76.3, sell at 77.1." On a deeper level, there are dozens of private chat windows: young people doing outsourced development who need to convert client dollars from foreign cards into USDT and then into rubles; small companies importing spare parts that need to pay Turkish suppliers in USDT; and unfamiliar numbers with accents, saying only: "Large amount, meet offline."

Aleksei's profit model is simple: earn a small spread on minor transactions or take a fraction of a percent as a "fee" on large deals, backed by bigger exchangers or trading platforms.

On the surface, all this looks like "currency exchange," but the funds quickly flow into deeper, darker currents.

Some people deposit USDT into local trading platforms with Russian-friendly interfaces and then convert it to bitcoin to transfer out; some use Russian platforms like Garantex to launder funds into offshore accounts; others use it to provide liquidity to companies in Georgia or the UAE.

At night, he splits the USDT he earned that day into two parts: one part is sold for rubles to pay the mortgage and buy groceries; the other part quietly sits in a multisig wallet, waiting for the day when the situation changes again—it might be the family's last insurance policy.

On statistical charts, he is just a tiny dot in the "Russian retail crypto inflow."

But the lines connecting all these dots form the invisible market.

1. After being cut off, new underground veins grow

Russia's crypto story did not start only after the sanctions.

In 2020, Eastern Europe was already one of the world's regions with the highest "crime-related crypto transaction volume." Chainalysis research showed that the darknet received a record $1.7 billions in crypto that year, most of which flowed to one name: Hydra. Hydra was the largest darknet market in the world, at its peak accounting for 75% of global darknet market revenue.

Before being taken down by German police in April 2022, it was essentially a massive "dark economy center"—drugs, fake documents, money laundering services, biometric data, all "unofficial world transactions" settled in stablecoins.

The fall of Hydra did not make this chain disappear; it only scattered the shadows: its users, infrastructure, and intermediary networks later regrouped among Garantex, Telegram OTC, and small trading platforms.

The dark side of Russia's crypto economy did not emerge only after the sanctions; it has deep historical roots.

Since the outbreak of the Russia-Ukraine war in 2022 and the escalation of sanctions, Russia has been blockaded layer by layer in the traditional financial world: foreign exchange reserves frozen, major banks excluded from SWIFT, Visa and Mastercard collectively withdrew. For a country whose lifeblood is energy and commodity exports, this is almost like being strangled.

But on-chain numbers tell another story:

According to Chainalysis statistics on European crypto activity from July 2024 to June 2025, Russia received $376.3 billions worth of crypto assets during this period, firmly ranking first in Europe, far surpassing the UK's $273.2 billions.

In bitcoin mining, Russia is no longer an invisible player. The latest estimate from hash rate data platform Hashrate Index shows that by the end of 2024, Russia accounts for about 16% of global bitcoin hash power—second only to the United States.

These two cold numbers are enough to show:

When the world tries to push Russia out of the traditional financial system, a new, underground crypto economy is rapidly growing.

If OTC traders like Aleksei are the capillaries, then local trading platforms like Garantex are the heart of the black market.

Garantex was first registered in Estonia, but its business focus has always been in Moscow. Since 2022, it has been successively added to the sanctions list by the US Treasury and the EU, accused of facilitating ransomware, darknet transactions, and sanctioned banks.

Logically, such a platform should have "died" long ago. But in September 2025, a report disclosed by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) showed: despite multiple crackdowns, Garantex "continues to operate in the shadows," providing crypto exchange and transfer services to clients in Russia and surrounding regions through a series of offshore companies, mirror sites, and proxy accounts.

Even more striking, a deep report by on-chain analytics firm TRM Labs pointed out: in 2025, Garantex and Iranian exchange Nobitex together contributed over 85% of crypto funds flowing into sanctioned entities and jurisdictions.

In March 2025, Tether froze USDT wallets related to Garantex worth about $280,000 (about 2.5 billions rubles), forcing the exchange to announce a suspension of business. But a few months later, the US Treasury sanctioned a new name: Grinex—"a crypto exchange created by Garantex employees to help it evade sanctions."

The black heart was punched, but started beating again in a new form.

2. A7A5: The Ambition and Paradox of "Ruble on Chain"

USDT is the current protagonist of Russia's shadow economy, but in the eyes of Moscow officials, it has a fatal flaw—it's too "American" and too "centralized."

In 2025, a new piece was quietly put on the table: A7A5, a stablecoin issued by a Kyrgyzstan platform, claiming to be "ruble-pegged."

The Financial Times revealed in an investigation that A7A5 completed about $6–8 billions worth of transactions in just four months, most occurring on weekdays and concentrated during Moscow trading hours. The custodian bank behind it is Russia's sanctioned defense bank Promsvyazbank.

EU and UK sanction documents simply describe it as "a tool for Russia to evade sanctions." By October 2025, the EU officially added A7A5 to the sanctions list, and on-chain analytics firms also pointed out its close coupling with Garantex and Grinex—making it a new central node in Russia's crypto clearing network.

The role played by A7A5 is subtle:

1. For Russian companies, it is a "ruble stablecoin that can bypass USDT risks";

2. For regulators, it is an "invisible tool to put the ruble on chain and bypass bank scrutiny."

Behind this is an increasingly clear Russian idea: "Since we can't do without stablecoins, at least some of them should be printed by ourselves."

But 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 become a "sovereign stablecoin," but has to circulate in a world not controlled by Russia. This is a microcosm of Russia's entire crypto strategy—it wants to break free from Western finance but has to continue using the "on-chain financial building blocks" built by the West.

3. What does crypto mean to Russia? Not the future, but the present

The Western world often sees crypto as an asset, a technology, or even a culture. But in Russia, it plays a completely different role:

1. For enterprises: Crypto is a backup channel for trade settlement

Russia imports high-tech parts, drone components, industrial instruments, and even consumer goods, many of which cannot be paid for through the traditional banking system. Thus, a hidden but stable route has formed: Russian companies export to Middle East/Central Asian intermediaries, then circulate through USDT/USDC to suppliers, and finally return to Moscow OTC to be exchanged for rubles.

It's not sophisticated, not romantic, not "decentralized," but it works, it moves, it survives.

Here, crypto is not a dream, but the least efficient yet only workable realism.

2. For young people, crypto is an exit from the local currency

Russia's banking system has long suffered from a lack of trust, and the ruble's years of fragility have made crypto the most natural asset safe haven for the middle class and young engineers.

If you casually ask a Moscow software engineer, he might not say "I speculate on coins," but rather "I convert my salary to USDT and keep it with a trusted OTC team on Telegram. The bank can freeze my card, but the chain can't freeze me."

This sentence is a microcosm of contemporary Russia.

3. For the state, crypto and mining are "digital energy exports"

Russia has some of the world's cheapest electricity—Siberian hydropower and surplus natural gas power make it a paradise for bitcoin mining.

Mining provides: an "export product" that does not go through the banking system; a globally exchangeable digital commodity; a way to circumvent financial blockades.

The Russian Ministry of Finance has officially acknowledged many times that "mining revenue is a necessary part of the national trade system."

This is no longer a grassroots activity, but a quasi-state economic sector.

4. For the gray system: Crypto is an invisible lubricant

This part is hard to quantify, but facts include European intelligence agencies pointing to Russian intelligence using crypto for information warfare and hacker operations, large-scale underground funds shuttling between Europe and Russia via stablecoins, and various smuggling networks highly dependent on on-chain capital flows.

Is Russia a "crypto powerhouse"?

The answer is more complicated than imagined. If you measure by technological innovation, it is not. If you look at VC projects and DeFi, it is not. But if you measure by mining, on-chain transaction volume, stablecoin inflows, and trade settlement dependence, it is a global crypto power center that cannot be ignored.

It did not "voluntarily become" one, but was "pushed by the world to become" one.