After the freeze of USDT wallets linked to Russia, a senior finance official said the nation should focus on developing its own stablecoins despite relying on the foreign-issued tokens.
The deputy head of Financial Policy at the Department of Finance, Osman Kabaloev, said on April 16, 2025, that the nation should focus on creating alternatives to the known stablecoin USDT.
While talking to Reuters, Osman said, “ The recent blockage makes us think that we need to consider creating internal tools similar to USDT, possibly pegged to other currencies.”
The statement came following the freeze activity by Tether in which it froze USDT worth 2.5 million robles on the crypto exchange Garantex.
Garantex is the same crypto exchange that faced allegations of facilitating global crimes, and the joint operation of the Department of Justice United States and the authorities of Finland and Germany announced the disruption of the exchange.
With this joint operation, the authorities have seized assets linked to Garantex in Finland and Germany, with a seizure of $26 million in illegal funds.
Crypto-related crime at its peak in Russia
Since the beginning of 2024, Russia has remained optimistic about cryptocurrencies and has structured a few good guidelines for digital asset mining.
The revenue of the crypto market of Russia is expected to reach $1.6 billion by 2025 end and per-user revenue is expected to reach $63.3, which was reported below $55 in the past years.
Russia’s crypto user base is expected to 24.59 million users by the end of this year, the number of users in the end 2023 were around 15.60 million.
In the past several quarters the number Ransomware Attacks remains quite high in Russia closely followed by darknet market operations, money laundering, sanction evasion, disinformation and election interference, crypto based hacking and data theft and crypto mixing are most prominents illicit activities concerning crypto in Russia.
At one time, services like Blender(dot)io and Sinbad(dot)io became popular as they offer the feature to obscure the origin of illicit funds, and hackers like Roman Seleznev have also troubled the market on the verge.
A few known blockchain analysis firms said in their report that a major involvement of the Russian crypto market has been observed in the darkmarket, termed as the haven for the bad actors and criminals.
In quite simple words, the part of WEB which is not easily accessible for the common man, as it is the part where the masterminds of different acts and events meet, and can buy weapons, drugs, humans and other types of things, commodities and assets that are fully banned in the real world.
Despite the illegal usage of darkweb it is also used for good deeds such as whistleblowing & secure communication, access to information and data in censored regions, privacy advocacy and education including anonymous research and reporting.
Major peoples accessing dark web uses Tor Browser but it is crucial to note that before accessing these types of ecosystem one should assure his or her security to avoid getting hacked or victimized.
