Illicit Flows Reverse Multi-Year Decline
Criminal cryptocurrency volume surged to an all-time high of $158 billion in 2025, a 145% increase from the previous year, according to a new report by blockchain intelligence firm TRM Labs. The spike reverses a three-year downtrend in illicit activity, driven almost exclusively by state-sponsored sanctions evasion rather than retail hacks or scams.
While the absolute value of dirty money skyrocketed, the broader market grew faster. Illicit activity accounted for just 1.2% of total crypto volume in 2025, down from 1.3% in 2024. The data reveals a bifurcation in the market: retail compliance is tightening, but nation-states are building dedicated, parallel financial rails on public blockchains.
The ‘A7A5’ Engine
The primary driver of the $158 billion figure was a greater than 400% explosion in sanctions-related volume. TRM Labs identified the A7A5 token, a ruble-pegged stablecoin issued on the Ethereum and Tron networks, as the central infrastructure for this shift.
Issued by the Kyrgyzstan-registered entity Old Vector and backed by the sanctioned Russian state lender Promsvyazbank, A7A5 processed approximately $72 billion in 2025. This single asset accounted for nearly half of all global illicit volume identified by TRM. The token operates as a bridge for Russian exporters to settle trades with counterparties in China and the Middle East, effectively bypassing SWIFT while utilizing the liquidity of public ledgers.
“Sanctions-related activity in 2025 was overwhelmingly driven by Russia-linked flows, demonstrating how sanctions risk now extends beyond individual transactions to the broader ecosystem around an asset.” — TRM Labs Report
Institutional Context: The Whack-a-Mole Problem
The surge highlights the limitations of blacklisting individual wallet addresses. When the U.S. Treasury sanctioned the Russian exchange Garantex, liquidity simply migrated to successor entities like Grinex and the A7 wallet cluster, which processed an additional $39 billion.
Unlike the DeFi hacks of 2022 or the Ponzi schemes of 2023, the 2025 crime wave is structural. It represents the formalization of “sovereign” money laundering, where sanctioned jurisdictions utilize stablecoins not for speculation, but as a settlement layer for international trade. Regulators now face a vector where the issuer, the bank, and the exchange are all complicit state actors.
