As we reported in the piece, there are almost 12bn A7A5 tokens in circulation, equivalent to around $156mn at the current exchange rate. Since Grinex launched, these tokens have been used to move more than $9.3bn to and from wallets that crypto analytics firms have linked to the exchange. That’s equivalent to the whole supply of the token moving in and out of Grinex wallets 60 times in just over three months.

we’ve found one marketplace that allows people to trade A7A5 for USDT, the widely used dollar-pegged stablecoin from Tether. This provides some clues about the scale of the trade in A7A5. Since the end of April, a total volume of $129mn worth of A7A5 was traded on this marketplace — most of which was switching ersatz roubles for sort-of dollars.

my god, what are we gonna do! the iron-clad sanctions don't hold!

The weird, mechanical nature of this means it surely isn’t an attempt to bid up interest in the token. It also doesn’t look like laundering. This is all too clunky.