A7 will settle foreign invoices in USDT for 0.3%, 11 days after US sanctions hit its network

A7's announcement describes a payment product with one published price. Customers fund in USDT, the foreign recipient is paid by ordinary bank transfer and never has to accept crypto ^[8], and the fee is a flat 0.3% ^[2], or $3,000 on a $1 million invoice ^[15]. A7 has not disclosed the banks that will process the transfers, the currencies it will support or how USDT will be converted to fiat. The announcement does not say whether the 0.3% includes conversion costs or intermediary bank charges. Nor does it say when general customers get access ^[16][17][18].

The sanctions record concerns the earlier business, and it is large. FinCEN says A7 Sub-Agents processed more than $17 billion between January 2025 and June 2026 ^[9], about $944 million a month over 18 months ^[13]. Treasury alleges that the network disguised restricted transactions as routine commercial payments, relying on intermediary firms and deceptive trade paperwork ^[11]. For scale only, 0.3% of $17 billion is $51 million ^[14]. The 0.3% is the fee for the new service, so the $51 million should not be read as revenue.

We think the service is a cheaper funding step for a business the US has already described. The compliance question follows from that: in a USDT-funded invoice, who is the paying entity, and which bank receives the wire? A USDT leg may be only another way to fund payments A7's customers were already making, and then the October 1 designation ^[3] already defined the exposure, with the new product adding little. Eleven days separate the designation and the announcement ^[12].

The test is the October 13 presentation by PSB chairman Petr Fradkov and A7 chief executive Ilan Shor ^[7]. If they name processing banks and a conversion route that screening teams can already see and block, we are wrong. We are also wrong if the service fails to go live after it.