Sanctioned States Moved $104B Through Crypto in 2025, Mostly Stablecoins

Published by James Harris on July 6, 2026July 6, 2026

Sanctioned states moved $104 billion through crypto in 2025, according to new Chainalysis data, a 694% increase from the prior year that pushed total illicit on-chain volume to a record $154 billion. This is no longer a story about rogue actors exploiting a gap in the financial system. It is a story about state-level infrastructure.

Stablecoins drove 84% of that illicit volume, which is the detail that matters most. Russia’s A7A5, a ruble-backed stablecoin, processed $93.3 billion in transactions in under a year, and a companion tool called the “A7A5 Instant Swapper” converted it into dollar-backed stablecoins with minimal KYC friction. That pipeline effectively gave sanctioned Russian entities access to dollar liquidity without touching a correspondent bank. Iran’s IRGC wallets processed over $3 billion, funding oil exports and proxy networks, and with the CLARITY Act now advancing in the US, those flows are drawing direct legislative attention. North Korea’s Lazarus-linked hackers, responsible for the $1.5 billion Bybit theft earlier this year, accounted for more than $2 billion in stolen assets, the largest single cryptocurrency theft ever recorded.

The BRICS de-dollarization agenda, by contrast, is still a conference agenda item. BRICS Pay, the BRICS Unit, and mBridge remain under development with no unified alternative to the dollar operational today.

The irony is structural: the same dollar-pegged stablecoins that Washington’s financial system produced have become the preferred instrument for evading Washington’s sanctions. Sanctioned states are not abandoning the dollar, they are accessing it through a channel that existing compliance frameworks were not built to monitor at scale. Chainalysis senior intelligence analyst Kaitlin Martin described it plainly to the Wall Street Journal: “Crypto has changed the sanctions evasion game significantly.” The CLARITY Act’s inclusion of new Iran-specific sanctions and explicit requirements for exchanges to freeze illicit funds signals that US legislators are now treating on-chain compliance as a foreign policy tool, not just a consumer protection issue.

What this accelerates is regulatory pressure on stablecoin issuers and the exchanges that list them. If $93 billion can move through a single ruble-backed token in less than a year, the compliance burden on Tether, Circle, and any issuer operating in or near US jurisdiction becomes a geopolitical question, not just a financial one. Projects building cross-border payment rails, particularly those with exposure to BRICS-adjacent markets, will face tighter scrutiny regardless of their stated use case.

The CLARITY Act is actively moving through the US legislative process, with Senator Lummis publicly citing its 16-plus illicit finance provisions as evidence that the framework addresses evasion directly rather than enabling it.