A bold initiative was announced at the Bank of Russia Financial Congress in St. Petersburg: the country's largest banks, led by Alfa-Bank, proposed creating a consortium to launch a new ruble stablecoin from scratch. However, the A7A5 token has been operating successfully on the market for over a year, capturing 43% of the non-dollar stablecoin segment by April 2026. A reasonable question arises: why build something that already works?
Consortium vs. Ready-Made Solution
Dmitry Vitman, Chief Operating Officer of Corporate and Investment Business at Alfa-Bank, proposed that the banking community join forces, stating that launching a liquid stablecoin alone is extremely difficult. According to him, the market needs an open consortium model. Notably, Vitman insisted on the need to build regulation around actually working products, not theoretical models, while simultaneously claiming that Russian crypto instruments "de facto do not exist."
This thesis looks, to put it mildly, strange given the existence of A7A5. At the same congress, PSB Deputy Chairman Mikhail Dorofeev directly outlined the market scale: cryptocurrency transactions in Russia amount to about 50 billion rubles per day, or over 10 trillion rubles per year. For cross-border settlements, businesses actively use, among others, the company "A7," created by PSB as part of the 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 issuer of A7A5 itself claims the role of a market standard. In interviews, project representatives stated that the token has all the prerequisites to become a basic settlement digital ruble asset due to its liquidity, real-world use, and reserve transparency. Over a year of operation, the ruble stablecoin has entered the global top three for cross-border transfers, with its main audience being importers, exporters, and payment providers.
The Sanctions Trail and the "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. Exceptions are 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.
Significantly, in the Central Bank's extensive report on stablecoins, 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 precisely the sanctions context that makes the regulator's silence particularly telling. According to UK authorities, the broader "A7" network claimed to have moved over $90 billion in 2025. Both the UK and the EU have imposed sanctions on related entities for aiding Russia in circumventing Western financial restrictions.
How sharply the authorities react to such accusations is shown by a recent case: Russia imposed sanctions on 17-year-old Briton Alexander Braude—son of prominent political activist Bill Braude—for research in which he accused A7A5 of circumventing Western sanctions. According to CertiK, the stablecoin processed over $110 billion in transactions despite sanctions from the US, EU, and UK. Alexander himself stated that his work "hit a nerve" with the Russian government and called on Western countries to increase pressure on exchanges that allow converting A7A5 into cash.
My analysis: We are witnessing a classic paradox: the market discusses how to build a ruble stablecoin, while the most prominent such instrument already conducts operations worth tens of billions of rubles per day. The Central Bank's ignoring of A7A5 is not an accident but a deliberate strategy. A token pegged to a sanctioned bank carries too high reputational and regulatory risks. However, the attempt to create a "clean" stablecoin within a consortium is an attempt to gain control over an already existing market, not to create something fundamentally new. The only question is whether the new instrument can offer the same liquidity and demand that A7A5 has already achieved.