Cutting A7A5's route into liquid stablecoins took its daily volume down 96%

Elliptic put A7A5's first year of operation at $102 billion across 251,000 transactions ^[4], which averages about $406,000 a transaction ^[1]. By June 2026 the ruble-pegged token was averaging $24.3 million a day, 96% below its July 2025 peak ^[5]. Annualise that and it is roughly $8.9 billion, under a tenth of the first year ^[2]. Elliptic attributes the fall mainly to restrictions that reduced the ways traders could convert A7A5 into more liquid stablecoins ^[6].

Leaked documents reconstruct $6.9 billion of bank-rail flow. TRM's $166 billion and Elliptic's $102 billion measure on-chain activity two different ways, and PSB chairman Pyotr Fradkov disclosed approximately $140 billion of cumulative turnover in August ^[16][15]. The source is explicit that these figures count different things. TRM itself strips out about $35 billion as circular transfers between A7 and other evasion actors, which leaves $131 billion ^[3][3]. The inflows it can attribute to a named sanctioned party are much smaller. More than $65 million came from an address TRM ties to Iran's Revolutionary Guard, about $5 million from Hamas, and at least $590,000 of BTCTurk and Woo X hack proceeds attributed to North Korean state hackers ^[11][12]. That is about $70.6 million, or 0.04% of the $166 billion ^[4].

Announcing 18 restrictions on May 26, UK Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper said A7 claims to have transferred over $90 billion in the previous year, close to half of Russia's annual military expenditure ^[7]. Against the network's own claim, the leaked bank trail of $6.9 billion is about 8% ^[5]. "There will be no safe havens for those enabling Russia's aggression," Cooper said ^[8].

The UK government describes A7 as a Kremlin-backed system that helps avoid Western sanctions, assists military acquisitions and enables oil revenue transactions ^[18]. TRM Labs, working with the Open Source Centre, found that the Russian defence finance institution Promsvyazbank and the Moldovan businessman Ilan Shor set it up. The job was cross-border payments for Russian companies that cannot use regular banks ^[10]. The Financial Times reported that international banks executed transactions involving A7 without really being aware of who was behind them, while blockchain investigators followed the trail into sanctioned digital-asset channels ^[17].

If conversion is the point where designations work, the next ones land on venues. The UK's May package already covers a bank in Kyrgyzstan and a global exchange it suspects of transferring over $1.5 billion to Moscow ^[9]. The counter-argument is substitution. The EU's 20th package names A7A5, RUBx and assistance to the digital ruble, and the US Treasury has designated A7 and its issuer Old Vector ^[13][14]. The alternative rails are already identified, so the 96% may just mean the flow is paying its costs somewhere else. What would settle it is A7A5 daily turnover climbing back toward the roughly $608 million a day its peak implies while the designations stand ^[6].