The world beyond SWIFT: Russia and the hidden economy of encryption

莫斯科冬天的早晨总是来得很慢。地铁从灰色的住宅区滑进市中心，车厢里的广告屏上照例滚动着卢布贷款、网购促销，还有一条看起来很正常的横幅：

“海外收入结算?USDT也可以。”

你很难想象，在一个被西方金融系统围堵的国家里，“稳定币”这个原本只在硅谷白皮书里出现的词，已经悄悄变成普通人和企业真实依赖的基础设施。

阿列克谢(化名)34岁，自称“做IT咨询”，但他的真正身份，是莫斯科一条稳定币黑市链条上的小节点。

早上九点，他的工作从检查Telegram频道开始。

手机上有四五个群，“莫斯科USDT圈内价”、“自由职业者结算通道”、“卢布现兑/卡转·只限熟人”

每个群里都有机器人报盘——“买USDT 76.3，卖77.1”，更深一层，是几十个私聊窗口，有做外包开发的年轻人，要把客户打来的美元从外卡换成USDT，再换卢布;有做进口小零件的小公司，需要用USDT支付土耳其供应商;也有带着口音的陌生号码，只说一句：“金额大，线下见面。”

阿列克谢的获利方式很简单，通过小额业务赚点点价差，或者大额单子，抽千分之几的“手续费”，背后再挂上更大的兑换商或交易所。

On the surface, all this may seem like a \"exchange of foreign currencies\", but funds will soon flow into deeper undercurrents.

Some people deposit USDT on a Russian-friendly local exchange and then convert it to Bitcoin for transfer, others use Russian platforms like Garantex to wash funds into offshore accounts, and others use it to replenish liquidity for companies in Georgia and 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, and the other part would lie quietly in a multi-signed wallet. When the situation changes again one day, it may be the last piece of insurance for the family. On the statistical table, he is just a small point of \"Russian retail investors\".

But the line connected by all these dots is the invisible market.

1. After being cut off, new blood vessels grew underground

Russia\'s encryption story did not begin after the sanctions.

In 2020, Eastern Europe was already \"one of the regions with the highest volume of crime-related crypto transactions\" in the world. Chainalysis research shows that the dark web received a record $1.7 billion in cryptocurrency that year, most of which went to one name: Hydra. Hydra is by far the world\'s largest dark web market, accounting for 75% of the global dark web market in its peak.

Before being taken down by 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\", settled in stablecoins.

The fall of Hydra didn\'t make the chain disappear, it just redispersed the shadow: its users, infrastructure, intermediary network, and later regrouped among Garantex, Telegram OTC, and small exchanges.

The dark side of Russia\'s crypto economy did not emerge after sanctions. It has a profound historical foundation.

Since the outbreak of the Russia-Ukraine War in 2022 and the comprehensive escalation of sanctions, Russia has been besieged in the traditional financial world: foreign exchange reserves have been frozen, major banks have been excluded from SWIFT, and Visa and Mastercard have withdrawn collectively. For a country whose exports of energy and commodities are its lifeline, this is almost the equivalent of being strangled.

But the numbers on the chain tell another story:

According to Chainalysis\'s statistics on European crypto activity from July 2024 to June 2025, Russia received US$376.3 billion equivalent in crypto assets during this period, ranking first in Europe, far exceeding the UK\'s US$273.2 billion.

Russia is no longer an invisible player in Bitcoin mining. The latest estimates from hash rate data platform Hashrate Index show that as of the end of 2024, Russia accounted for approximately 16% of global Bitcoin computing power-second only to the United States.

These two numbers are cold, but they are enough to show:

As the world tries to drive Russia out of the traditional financial system, a new, buried crypto economy is growing rapidly.

If OTC vendors like Alexei are capillaries, 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 on the sanctions list by the U.S. Treasury Department and the European Union, accused of facilitating ransomware, dark web transactions, and sanctioned banks.

Logically speaking, such a platform should have been \"dead\" long ago. But in September 2025, a report disclosed by the International Union of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) showed that despite multiple rounds of attacks, Garantex actually \"continued to operate in the shadows\", providing crypto exchange and transfer services to customers in Russia and surrounding regions through a series of offshore companies, mirror sites and proxy accounts.

What is even more eye-catching is that an in-depth report by online analytics firm TRM Labs pointed out that in 2025, Garantex and Iranian exchange Nobitex, together contributed more than 85% of the crypto funds flowing into sanctioned entities and jurisdictions.

In March 2025, Tether froze the USDT wallet related to Garantex worth approximately US$280,000 (approximately 2.5 billion rubles), and the exchange was forced to announce a suspension of business. But a few months later, the U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned a new name: Grinex-\"a cryptocurrency exchange created by Garantex employees to help them circumvent sanctions.\"

Black Heart was punched and beat in a new form.

2. A7A5: The ambition and paradox of \"linking the ruble\"

The 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 stablecoin 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 worth of transactions in four months, most of which occurred on weekdays and concentrated during the Moscow trading hours. The custodian bank behind it was Promsvyazbank, Russia\'s sanctioned defense bank.

EU and UK sanctions documents simply describe it as \"a tool for Russia to circumvent sanctions.\" By October 2025, the European Union will officially include A7A5 on the sanctions list. On-Chain Analytics also pointed out that there is a close coupling between it and Garantex and Grinex-becoming a new central node in Russia\'s crypto clearing network.

The role played by A7A5 is very 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 the chain and bypass bank censorship.\"

Behind this lies an increasingly clear idea in Russia: \"Since we cannot live without stablecoins, at least part of them must be printed by us ourselves.\"

The paradox is that any stablecoin that wants to go global must rely on infrastructure beyond Russia\'s control: public blockchains, cross-border nodes, overseas exchanges, and third-country financial systems.

The A7A5 wanted to become a \"sovereign stablecoin\" but had to circulate in a world that Russia did not control. This is a microcosm of Russia\'s entire crypto strategy-it wants to get rid of Western finance, but also has to continue to use the set of \"on-chain financial building blocks\" built by the West.

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

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

1. For businesses: Encryption is an alternate 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. As a result, a secret but stable route was formed: Russian companies exported to Middle East/Central Asia intermediaries, then circulated to suppliers through USDT/USDC, and then returned to Moscow for OTC exchange in rubles.

It is not smart, romantic, and \"decentralized\", but it can be used, mobile, and alive.

Encryption is not a dream here, it is the least efficient but only dynamic realism.

2. For young people, crypto is an export to escape the local currency

The Russian banking system has long lacked trust, and the fragile performance of the ruble for many years has made crypto the most natural asset haven for the middle class and young engineers.

Ask any software engineer in Moscow, and what he may tell you is not \"I speculate in money,\" but \"I exchange my salary for USDT and put it with Telegram\'s trusted OTC team. The bank freezes the card, but the chain will not freeze me.\"

This sentence is a microcosm of contemporary Russia.

3. For countries, encryption and mining are \"digital energy exports\"

Russia has one of the cheapest electricity in the world-Siberian hydropower and natural gas surplus electricity have become a haven 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 blockade

The Russian Ministry of Finance has officially admitted many times that \"mining profits are an essential part of the national trading system.\"

This is no longer a private activity, but a quasi-national economic sector.

4. Gray system: Encryption is an invisible lubricant

This part is difficult to quantify, but the facts include European intelligence agencies pointing out that Russian intelligence services use encryption for information warfare, hacking payments, large-scale underground funds shuttle between Europe and Russia with the help of stablecoins, and various smuggling networks are highly dependent on the chain fund track.

4. Is Russia a \"major encryption country\"? The answer is more complicated than you might think

If you measure it by technological innovation, no.

If you use VC projects to watch DeFi, it\'s not.

If you measure it by mining, on-chain transaction volume, stablecoin inflows, and trade settlement dependence, it is a center of crypto power that cannot be ignored globally.

It is not \"voluntarily becoming\", but \"pushed to become by the world.\"