From Goal Architect to System Architect: Crypto Industry, International Settlements, and Technological Sovereignty in the Era of Sanctions 2026 | Tatiana Burmagina | SFORNEWS

From Goal Architect to System Architect: Crypto Industry, International Settlements, and Technological Sovereignty in the Era of Sanctions Pressure

When Andrew Chen recently remarked that the product manager would soon turn into a “goal architect,” I smiled. Because my partners and I have been doing goal architecture for over 20 years. It’s just that before it was called differently — systems engineering, strategic planning, development management. But the essence has always been the same: to see the forest for the trees, the big picture behind individual tasks, tomorrow’s possibilities behind today’s needs.
And today, when the world of finance and the crypto industry is entering a zone of turbulence, this profession acquires new, critical significance. The question cui prodest — who benefits — becomes the key to understanding the processes that will determine the architecture of international settlements for decades to come.

February 2026: A New Frontier of Sanctions Pressure
February 2026 became a turning point for the international crypto market. The European Commission, within the framework of the 20th sanctions package, proposed a complete ban on any cryptocurrency transactions with Russia. This is not about targeted restrictions against individual services, but about a total ban on interaction with any crypto platforms registered in the Russian Federation.
Brussels stated the ineffectiveness of the previous approach: after some structures were blacklisted, new ones quickly emerged on the market. The initiative is primarily directed against the “successors” of the sanctioned Garantex exchange — the cross-border payment ecosystem A7 and its ruble-pegged stablecoin A7A5, whose total transaction volume has already exceeded $100 billion.
Of particular interest is the Kyrgyzstan vector. The EU may for the first time apply “anti-circumvention measures” and ban the export of dual-use goods to the country, as European supplies to Kyrgyzstan have grown by almost 800%, and exports from there to Russia by 1200%. This is a classic example of how sanctions pressure changes the geography of commodity and financial flows.
In parallel, Britain has created a specialized unit, the Crypto Cash Fusion Cell, to combat the use of digital currencies to circumvent sanctions. According to Chainalysis, stablecoins already account for 84% of illegal crypto transactions — and this is a signal that pressure will only increase.

Technical Impossibility of a Total Ban
However, as financial analyst Mikhail Belyaev notes, this step is doomed to failure from the outset. Operations with digital assets are outside the control zone of official regulators and the traditional banking system, which makes them virtually invulnerable to direct bans.
The main feature of cryptocurrencies is the absence of a single regulatory center and their decentralized nature. There is no organization that could, at the request of the European Commission, block all necessary wallets or transactions at once. On a global scale, it is physically impossible to completely stop cryptocurrency flows, and the initiators of the sanctions themselves understand this.
The result of such restrictions is not the isolation of the Russian economy, but a further transformation of payment routes: abandonment of the dollar, transition to national currencies, and a move into decentralized digital assets, where sanctions simply cease to work by definition.

Institutionalization Instead of the “Grey Zone”
Paradoxically, the sanctions pressure has led to a result opposite to expectations. Instead of a mass exodus into the shadows, the cryptocurrency sector began to rapidly restructure towards institutional and managed forms of using digital assets.
The key driver was the corporate sector. Businesses needed payment mechanisms that would allow them to continue operating under restrictions without increasing legal and operational risks. For companies, documents confirming settlements, sources of funds, and fulfillment of obligations are critically important. Informal schemes did not provide the necessary level of legal certainty.
As a result, the focus shifted from maximum transaction speed to their manageability, reproducibility, and compliance with regulatory requirements. Cryptocurrency has taken an applied infrastructural niche — it is used not as an independent settlement goal, but as a tool for moving liquidity between jurisdictions.

Russian Legal Framework: The Foundation of Digital Sovereignty
In 2026, Russia holds leading positions in the legalization of cross-border digital settlements, creating a protected contour for business.
The Experimental Legal Regime (ELR) according to Federal Law No. 221 (dated 08.08.2024) allows the Bank of Russia to supervise settlements in digital currencies for foreign economic activity participants. Companies can conduct payments in a legal field under state protection.
Federal Law No. 259 “On Digital Financial Assets” clearly delineates internal and external markets. The ban on using crypto as a means of payment inside the Russian Federation (Article 14) is compensated by broad opportunities for international trade.
The Tax Code (Article 38) qualifies digital currency as property, which allows companies to transparently reflect operations in accounting through exchange contracts or asset realization.
Since 2026, amendments to the Administrative Code have come into force, establishing fines for illegal crypto payments within the country. This stimulates the market to transition to legal, structured schemes within the ELR framework.

Working Scheme of International Settlements
In practice, businesses use cryptocurrency as a transit tool, which allows “detaching” the payment from Russian origin and protecting foreign counterparties from secondary sanctions.
The standard model looks like this: a Russian company acquires USDT in the Russian Federation (within the ELR framework), the assets are transferred to a licensed agent in a trusted jurisdiction, the agent converts the crypto into fiat currency (yuan, lira, dirhams, or euros), and the invoice payment to the supplier is made from the foreign company’s account. For the counterparty, this looks like a standard interbank payment.
The geography of settlements covers key hubs. In China, due to strict checks by state banks, the “Hong Kong transit” is actively used — crypto is converted into offshore yuan (CNH). Turkey acts as a liquidity hub with a developed network of OTC platforms. For purchasing critical imports into the EU, multi-stage schemes are used: RUB → USDT → AED (UAE) / Serbia → EUR → supplier.

Digital Ruble and Digital Yuan: A New Level of Integration
In parallel with the development of cryptocurrency infrastructure, Russia and China are accelerating the promotion of their own central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). Their potential integration is seen as the next stage in the evolution of cross-border settlements.
For Russia, the digital ruble is an instrument for direct interstate settlements without correspondent banks, a way to strengthen currency control and transparency of foreign economic activity, a basis for automated settlements through smart contracts, and an element of financial sovereignty.
China actively uses e-CNY in cross-border pilot projects (mBridge, BIS), forming an alternative payment architecture to the dollar. For Chinese exporters, the digital yuan reduces currency risks, speeds up settlements, minimizes the participation of Western banks, and strengthens state control over capital movement.
The expert community considers a hybrid interaction scheme: digital ruble → bridge platform → digital yuan. In such a model, cryptocurrency remains an instrument of flexibility, central bank digital currencies an instrument of stability, and settlements between the Russian Federation and the PRC could transition to a fully sovereign digital environment.

Global Context: AI Infrastructure and Tokenization
Against this backdrop, the investment giant BlackRock published a thematic forecast for 2026, in which it highlighted two key trend linkages: the acceleration of AI development and the increasing dependence of the digital economy on physical infrastructure.
The company emphasizes that the AI boom has already moved from the experimentation phase to the scaling phase, but the availability and reliability of electricity are becoming critical factors for new capacities. Total infrastructure investments — from energy to data centers — could exceed $100 trillion by 2040.
For the crypto market, stablecoins and tokenization are named as key drivers. Transaction volumes in stablecoins are growing faster than spot trading volumes in crypto assets, indicating a shift in focus from trading to payments and settlements.
More than 65% of tokenized assets are on the Ethereum network, which allows it to be considered as the basic infrastructure layer for tokenization. At the same time, BlackRock records growing institutional interest in Bitcoin through exchange-traded products: the iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT) fund reached $70 billion in assets under management in 341 trading days.

Intent-Centric: New Trend or New Reality?
In parallel, the concept of “intent-oriented” protocols is gaining strength within the crypto industry itself. NEAR Protocol, in its 2026 roadmap, is betting on the fusion of AI-Intents, user AI, and the expansion of NEAR Intents into a leading trading platform.
The AI-Intents framework allows users to define the desired outcome (for example, exchanging tokens between networks), while decentralized solvers optimize execution paths. This is especially important for AI agents, which can autonomously express and execute intents on behalf of users.

By mid-2026, NEAR Intents projects reaching $10 billion in weekly trading volume, ten times the 2025 figures. The protocol has already achieved 1 million transactions per second in public tests, added three shards, and launched AI Cloud tools serving over 100 million users.
This is exactly what we have been talking about for the last 20 years: abandoning manual management of every detail in favor of strategic goal-setting. Users formulate intents — the system itself finds the optimal execution path.

Architectural Conclusion
Sanctions cut off external revenues from the fuel and energy sector — which means we need to use internal resources as efficiently as possible and seek new channels for international cooperation. The crypto industry today is not just a speculative platform, but a tool for preserving liquidity and conducting cross-border settlements under conditions of total restrictions.
By 2026, Russia has effectively created a hybrid model of international settlements, where cryptocurrency, state digital currencies, and payment agents work as a single mechanism. This system reduces the economy’s vulnerability, ensures import stability, and forms a new standard for foreign economic activity in a multipolar world.
Where traditional finance sets up checkpoints, digital assets seek bypass routes. Where the West imposes bans, the East creates alternatives. And in this new reality, the winners are not those who execute faster, but those who design the architecture of entire systems more precisely.
In the long term, it is precisely this architecture that will become the foundation of digital financial sovereignty and integration into the alternative global economy. Cryptocurrency in Russia’s foreign trade is a mature infrastructural layer ensuring the country’s economic security.
In 2022, I wrote about decarbonization, the ESG agenda, and the energy transition. Back then, it seemed like a distant theory. Today, we see how energy, digital assets, and international settlements are intertwining into a single knot. Mining requires cheap energy. International settlements require independent channels. Technological sovereignty requires its own solutions.

“Look to the root” (Kozma Prutkov).

Systems Design Bureau