Stablecoin operator Tether has frozen $27 million in USDt on the sanctioned Russian Garantex crypto exchange, forcing the platform to halt operations.
“Tether has entered the war against the Russian crypto market and blocked our wallets worth more than 2.5 billion rubles [$27 million],” Garantex wrote on its official announcement channel on Telegram on March 6.
The exchange said it has temporarily suspended all services, including withdrawals, with its website currently under maintenance.
Garantex halted operations amid the asset freeze. Source: Garantex.org
The news came after the European Union sanctioned Garantex on Feb. 26 as part of the 16th package of sanctions on “Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine.”
“All USDT in Russian wallets is currently under threat”
While announcing the news, Garantex warned its users that “all USDT (USDT) in Russian wallets is currently under threat.”
“We will fight, and we will not give up,” it added in the announcement.
Source: Telegram
The EU’s sanctions on Garantex came three years after the start of the Russia-Ukraine conflict.
“For the first time, the Council also decided to sanction a cryptocurrency exchange based in Russia, Garantex, which is closely associated with EU-sanctioned Russian banks,” the EU stated.
Regulators in the United States were the first to announce sanctions against Garantex, with the US Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) imposing the sanctions on Garantex in April 2022.
Cointelegraph reached out to Tether regarding its decision to freeze Garantex wallets but did not receive a response by publication time.
Garantex volumes surged 1,000% in 3 years: Data
According to the OFAC data, Garantex is a Russian crypto exchange founded in late 2019 and originally registered in Estonia.
“The majority of Garantex’s operations are carried out in Moscow, including at Federation Tower and Saint Petersburg, Russia, where other sanctioned virtual currency exchanges have also operated,” it said in 2022.
Garantex is not listed on major crypto data aggregators like CoinGecko or CoinMarketCap, but sources like CoinPaprika suggest that its daily trading volumes have massively surged since 2022.
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According to CoinPaprika data, Garantex’s volume ballooned more than 1,000% in the past three years, from roughly $11 million in daily volumes on March 1, 2022, to $121.6 million on March 1, 2025.
Garantex’s daily trading volumes in the past three years. Source: CoinPaprika
If true, the size of Garantex’s trading volumes is still far from major global crypto exchanges like Binance, which trades $23 billion daily, according to CoinGecko.
“It’s impossible to ban the crypto market for Russia”
Though Tether’s USDT freeze on Garantex is not a massive event for a broader crypto market, it has significant implications for the Russian crypto ecosystem, according to local lawmakers.
Anton Gorelkin, deputy head of the Russian parliament’s committee on information policy, took to his Telegram channel on Thursday, suggesting that the freeze is “for sure not the last case when Western countries put pressure” on the crypto industry.
“But it should be recognized that it is impossible to completely block this market for Russia,” the lawmaker wrote.
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