Islamic Finance Principles Assessment
Riba — Does A7A5 involve interest?
A7A5's yield is not a peripheral feature but its central mechanism: holders earn a rebase-distributed share of interest earned on rouble bank deposits, tied directly to the Central Bank of Russia's key rate. This is textbook riba, generated automatically and structurally, not through any trade, service, or profit-sharing venture. For Muslim investors, this alone makes the token difficult to hold as a savings or investment instrument.
Assessment: Riba Dominant
Score: 9.4/100
Our methodology examines 10 criteria to evaluate how well A7A5 avoids interest-based mechanisms.
The protocol's revenue and holder rewards derive entirely from interest earned on fiat rouble reserves held in overnight bank deposits, notably at Promsvyazbank. A portion was historically retained by the issuer for operations, while the remainder passed to token holders via automatic rebase; since February 2026 nearly all of this interest income flows to holders. There is no underlying trade, asset appreciation, or shared business risk generating this return — it is a direct, contractually fixed interest pass-through, placing the token's core income mechanism squarely within conventional riba-based finance rather than any profit-and-loss-sharing structure.
Beyond the interest-bearing reserve model, A7A5's own roadmap describes forthcoming collateralised lending, leveraged positions, and perpetual/carry-trade products — all conventional interest- and leverage-based financial instruments layered on top of an already interest-generating base asset. The stablecoin's entire raison d'être, tokenizing rouble bank deposits for cross-border settlement, is inseparable from the interest income those deposits generate. There is no version of holding or transacting in A7A5 that does not implicate the holder in receiving deposit interest, making the business model incompatible with riba-free finance at a structural, not incidental, level.
Gharar — How much uncertainty does A7A5 involve?
Uncertainty here is substantial and multi-layered: beyond normal smart-contract risk, there is deep ambiguity about who actually controls the protocol and why. Open-source contracts and one audit modestly reduce technical uncertainty, but undisclosed ownership and sanctioned counterparties sharply increase informational and counterparty risk. On balance, the opacity around governance and purpose is severe enough to warrant real caution.
Assessment: Excessive Gharar (High Uncertainty)
Score: 27.9/100
Our methodology examines 15 criteria including team transparency, audit quality, and governance.
A7A5's own documentation references a "team of experts" without naming a single individual or credential. Actual ownership only surfaces through investigative journalism, which links the issuer, Old Vector LLC (Kyrgyzstan), and A7 LLC to Ilan Shor, convicted of large-scale bank fraud, and to Promsvyazbank, a sanctioned Russian defense-linked bank. Smart contracts are published on GitHub, offering some technical transparency, but this does not offset the near-total absence of verifiable, named accountability behind the entity that controls minting, blacklisting, and fee parameters for a multi-billion-dollar token.
One security audit is documented: Decurity, conducted 21–23 January 2025, which found one medium and one low-severity issue, both subsequently remediated. A separately mentioned "reserves audit" milestone appears in project materials but no auditor, methodology, or findings are disclosed anywhere in available sources, leaving reserve verification essentially unaudited and unconfirmed. Risk disclosures around sanctions exposure, counterparty concentration in a single sanctioned bank, and issuer discretion over blacklisting and fees are also absent from user-facing documentation, compounding the informational gap around a token carrying real regulatory and reputational risk.
Maysir — Does A7A5 involve gambling or speculation?
A7A5 is not designed as a betting or lottery-style instrument; it functions as a payment and settlement stablecoin with a defined redemption mechanism. Its rebasing yield is formulaic rather than probabilistic, which reduces gambling-style characteristics. The larger maysir-adjacent concern lies in secondary-market speculation and the planned leveraged products layered on top of the base token.
Assessment: Maysir / Qimar (Gambling)
Score: 20.3/100
Our methodology examines 11 criteria to determine whether A7A5 is a gambling instrument or a genuine economic tool.
A7A5 serves a genuine, documented function: a 1:1 rouble-pegged token minted only against fiat deposits and burned on redemption, used for cross-border settlement and reportedly enormous transaction volume. This tokenized-deposit utility, and the mechanical, rate-linked nature of its rebase reward, differ meaningfully from gambling or zero-sum speculative products, since value transfer is tied to real underlying deposits and interest accrual rather than chance-based payoffs or adversarial win/lose structures between participants.
Reported volumes exceeding $100 billion suggest usage patterns resembling closed-loop B2B settlement tied to the Grinex exchange rather than broad organic retail adoption, and volumes have fallen sharply amid sanctions pressure and stalled issuance. Meanwhile, the issuer's announced plans for collateralised lending, leveraged positions, and perpetual/carry-trade products would introduce clearly speculative, leverage-amplified instruments on top of the base stablecoin. While the token itself is not a gambling product, this trajectory toward derivatives-style features warrants caution for investors seeking to avoid speculative exposure.
The Full 27-Point Screening
1. Legitimacy (4 criteria)
| Criterion | Score | Analysis |
|---|
| Team Transparency | 15/100 | The project's own site names no individual team members, and the actual controlling owners (identified only via independent investigations) include a figure convicted of large-scale bank fraud, undermining transparent, accountable disclosure. |
| Fraud & Scam Risk | 8/100 | The coin's issuer and affiliated entities have been sanctioned by the US and UK for facilitating sanctions evasion and are directly linked to a shuttered exchange implicated in ransomware and dark-web transactions. |
| Use Case Legitimacy | 15/100 | Sources describe the coin's primary stated purpose as enabling cross-border transfers that bypass Western banking restrictions rather than serving as a general-purpose investment or payments utility. |
| Ethical Practices | 12/100 | Multiple independent sources state the coin's own design and stated purpose was built specifically to help sanctioned actors move funds outside regulated channels, which is a feature of its own design rather than incidental third-party misuse. |
Summary: A7A5 is a real, high-volume stablecoin operation, but its controlling owners are tied to a convicted fraudster and a sanctioned defense-linked bank, and its issuer and affiliates have been directly sanctioned for facilitating sanctions evasion.
2. Project Operations (9 criteria)
| Criterion | Score | Analysis |
|---|
| Core Protocol Business | 15/100 | The base protocol's core business model is generating and passing through bank-deposit interest income, which is a riba-based revenue source built into the protocol itself. |
| Transaction Fees | 15/100 | Transfer fees are retained by the issuer and the core "fee" mechanism is really an automatic interest-based rebase distribution, which reflects riba rather than a fair, burn-based fee structure. |
| Treasury Assets | 5/100 | Treasury reserves are explicitly placed in interest-bearing overnight bank deposits, which is a direct interest-bearing holding. |
| Revenue Model | 5/100 | The documented revenue model is bank-deposit interest income shared between the issuer and holders, an explicitly interest-based revenue source. |
| Transparency | 45/100 | Smart contracts and documentation are published and one audit report is public, but the true ownership and control structure was only revealed through outside investigation rather than the project's own disclosures. |
| Governance | 15/100 | Issuance, pausing, blacklisting and fee-setting are all controlled unilaterally by the issuer with no holder voting rights described. |
| Launch Fairness | 40/100 | Tokens are minted only against fiat deposits with no described presale, but no information on founder/insider allocation or launch mechanics is available to assess fairness fully. |
| Token Distribution | 25/100 (low evidence) | No breakdown of token distribution among founders, insiders or public holders is provided in any source. |
| Speculation/Utility Ratio | 30/100 | Analysts note trading patterns consistent with closed-loop institutional/B2B flow tied to a single exchange rather than broad genuine retail utility, alongside heavy promotion of yield and planned leverage/carry-trade products. |
Summary: The protocol mints and burns a rouble-pegged rebasing token against bank deposits and automatically passes interest income to holders under fully centralised issuer control, with no disclosed insider vesting or distribution data.
3. Financial Health (4 criteria)
| Criterion | Score | Analysis |
|---|
| Protocol Revenue | 5/100 | Protocol revenue is explicitly sourced from interest earned on bank deposits, a clear riba-based mechanism. |
| Financial Status | 40/100 | The coin has processed very large volumes and reached meaningful market cap, but volumes and issuance have declined sharply following sanctions, indicating financial instability tied to geopolitical exposure. |
| Interest Assessment | 5/100 | The base protocol itself generates and distributes bank-deposit interest as its central feature, which is a direct, undisguised interest mechanism. |
| Audit Quality | 60/100 | A named firm, Decurity, conducted a smart-contract audit in January 2025 with published findings that were subsequently fixed, though only one audit of the contract layer (not reserves/custody) is documented. |
Summary: Protocol revenue and holder yield are both generated directly from bank-deposit interest, a riba-based native yield mechanism, with only one smart-contract audit publicly documented and no comprehensive reserve audit found.
4. Token Economics (5 criteria)
| Criterion | Score | Analysis |
|---|
| Token Purpose | 20/100 | The token has genuine payment/settlement utility, but its central selling point and mechanic is interest income pass-through, which taints its utility classification from a Shariah perspective. |
| Governance Rights | N/A | No holder governance mechanism exists at all; control is fully centralised with the issuer, and this absence is treated as neutral rather than a distinct additional concern. |
| Rewards Distribution | 10/100 | Reward payouts follow a fixed formula tied to the central bank's key rate rather than being based on real profit-and-loss sharing from productive activity. |
| Speculation Controls | 10/100 | No anti-speculation features are described, and the project has announced plans for leveraged positions, perpetual contracts and carry trades that would increase speculative use. |
| Asset Backing | 15/100 | The token is backed by fiat rouble deposits that are themselves placed to earn bank interest, so the backing asset itself is interest-bearing. |
Summary: The token offers genuine payment utility but its defining reward mechanic is a fixed-formula interest pass-through with no holder governance rights or anti-speculation controls, and its backing asset is itself interest-bearing.
5. Staking Mechanism
A7A5 has no native staking mechanism, so these five criteria are not applicable and are excluded from the score entirely rather than counted as zeros.
Overall Assessment: A7A5 combines credible technical infrastructure and audit disclosure with serious, well-documented concerns around sanctioned ownership, an interest-based core revenue and reward design, and a stated purpose of circumventing Western financial restrictions.
Written by ThanvirFounder, Ex Director S&P Global Energy
Reviewed by Imam Omar SiddiqiShariah Scholar