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Mainft has a story about Stablecoin, backed by a new Rouble called the A7A5, and a new exchange called the Grinex.
Despite Western sanctions in Russia, established by the fleeing Moldovan oligarchs and Russian defense sector banks, the new cryptocurrency token, designed to allow cross-border payments, moved around $9.3 billion in just four months after its launch.
One of that much of its curiosity is the size of this Russian crypto venture.
As reported in this work, around 1.2 billion A7A5 tokens are circulating, equivalent to about $156 million at current exchange rates. Since Grinex was launched, these tokens have been used to move more than $9.3 billion to and from wallets linked to exchanges by Crypto Analytics companies. This is equivalent to the entire supply of tokens that enter and exit Grinex wallets 60 times in just three months.
Why does it grow so big? And what is the actual scale of economic activity that underpins these movements?
This is the first thing to say. There is a real thing that supports the volume and you can see the actual interaction. For example, we found one market where people can trade A7A5 for USDT.
This provides some clues regarding the size of the A7A5 trade. Since the end of April, a total of $129 million worth of A7A5 has been traded in this market. Most of them switched to the Elsatz ruble for $1.
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If you squint, the volume of trading looks like a certain kind of thing, but the market seems lumpy. It appears that a few actors are converting large sums of money. At the time of analysis, there were only 612 swaps in total.
The A7A5 can be said to be used for cross-currency transactions measured in hundreds of millions of millions, but most of the movements pointed out in this work is far from here.
There’s a reason why coins move so fast. A small number of wallets regularly send and receive so many A7A5s with suspected Grinex wallets. And they all show the same behavior.
These wallets receive a massive sum of A7A5s worth millions or tens of millions of dollars from one Grinex wallet. After that, a while (usually less than an hour) the exact same value is paid to another different Grinex wallet.
I found 8 accounts that followed this pattern. This will result in a total of over 20 transfers to suspect Grinex wallets. Their transfer accounts for $4.6 billion, $9.3 billion.
The strange and mechanical nature of this means it is not an attempt to raise interest in tokens. Also, it doesn’t look like washing. All this is clunky. This also costs money. Officials are paying “gas fees” to exchange these tokens. And the total is large.
It appears that someone is using the A7A5 in some kind of administrative financial process. And as we look at the work, this is a stubcoin that maintains Moscow’s opening hours.
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There are many possibilities here. Will the token be repaid after the transaction is cleared while it is being expanded into a third-party account as collateral? Or is something different going on? You can answer the postcard and speculations can enter the comment box.
Read more:
– Cryptocoin for Russian Shadow Payment Powers 9 billion dollars (FT)
