Russian banks, led by Alfa-Bank, have proposed creating a fundamentally new ruble stablecoin. This announcement was made at the Bank of Russia Financial Congress in St. Petersburg, where the architecture of the digital asset market was discussed. However, the key question that immediately arose in the professional community is: why reinvent the wheel when the A7A5 token has been successfully operating on the market for over a year?
Consortium vs. Ready-Made Solution
Dmitry Vitman, Chief Operating Officer of Corporate and Investment Business at Alfa-Bank, suggested that the banking community join forces. According to him, launching a liquid stablecoin alone is an extremely challenging task, so the market should consider a consortium model. "We are open to building a common instrument on an open basis within some alliance of Russian market players," Vitman stated.
Notably, the speaker insisted on the need for regulation, drawing from actually working products rather than theoretical models. At the same time, he claimed that Russian crypto instruments de facto do not exist today, and the market needs to be allowed to create them. He sees the value of a stablecoin primarily in exports to the international market and servicing foreign trade settlements, rather than in domestic payments.
This thesis looks, to say the least, debatable against the backdrop of the already existing A7A5. At the same congress, PSB Deputy Chairman Mikhail Dorofeev directly outlined the market scale: cryptocurrency operations in Russia amount to about 50 billion rubles per day, or more than 10 trillion rubles per year. For cross-border settlements, businesses use, among others, the company "A7," created by PSB as part of a special infrastructure for such payments. In other words, the bank whose deposits back A7A5 openly speaks about a working solution, while others propose building an analogue from scratch.
The Sanctions Elephant in the Room
The Central Bank's position remains restrained. The regulator maintains a strict ban on domestic stablecoin payments: the ruble remains the sole legal tender. An exception is allowed only for cross-border transactions. The Central Bank cites sanctions as the main threat—issuers of centralized systems can freeze coins without court decisions.
It is telling that in a report of about fifty pages, A7A5 is not mentioned once. Meanwhile, by the end of 2025, the token had captured over 40% of the non-dollar stablecoin segment, and the volume of transactions involving it exceeded $100 billion. The asset is backed by deposits in the sanctioned Promsvyazbank.
It is the sanctions context that makes the regulator's silence particularly revealing. According to UK authorities, the broader A7 network in 2025 claimed to have moved over $90 billion. Both the UK and the EU have imposed sanctions on related entities for aiding Russia in circumventing Western financial restrictions.
Market Paradox
This creates a paradoxical situation: the market is discussing how to build a ruble stablecoin, while the most prominent such instrument simultaneously conducts operations worth tens of billions of rubles per day and remains in the shadows for the regulator. The reason, presumably, lies in the toxic sanctions tail that trails A7A5.
Analyst's Comment: The banks' attempt to create an alternative to A7A5 resembles an attempt to build a parallel universe. While the consortium discusses architecture, the existing stablecoin is already processing billions in volume. The question is not whether it is technically possible to create a new instrument, but whether it can compete with the already established liquidity and infrastructure of A7A5. Ignoring this fact is a strategic mistake that could lead to resource dispersion and loss of time.