Brussels adopted its 21st Russia sanctions package on July 23, naming HTX among 14 crypto platforms in a transaction ban that takes effect August 23. The bigger move is the new power to cut off crypto services from entire countries if their platforms help Russia work around EU restrictions.
HTX, the exchange formerly known as Huobi, is now on a list no EU-regulated bank, payment firm, or crypto service provider can ignore. Reuters reported that Hong Kong-based billionaire Justin Sun bought a controlling stake in Huobi in 2022, and the EU entry identifies the target as HTX under Huobi Global SA. The ban is not an asset freeze. It is a transaction prohibition. The clock is running.
The 21st package is the EU's largest round of listings in four years. The Council of the EU said it added 218 designations, covering 48 individuals and 170 entities, and separately targeted 94 banks and major financial institutions. The crypto piece is smaller by headcount but sharper in design: 14 platforms across Georgia, Panama, the UAE, the Marshall Islands, Kyrgyzstan, and Belarus are now subject to a transaction ban. That part is easy to miss. According to Chainalysis, the same package also creates a first-of-its-kind mechanism for third-country crypto bans, letting the EU prohibit transactions between EU operators and crypto providers in a country that hosts services used by Russia to evade sanctions.
That is the real move. Brussels has spent years designating firms one by one, only to watch activity move to new corporate shells, new exchanges, and new jurisdictions. Garantex was hit. The network re-formed around A7 and A7A5. If your exchange touches EU rails, you don't get to treat HTX as somebody else's compliance problem anymore.
The EU's case against HTX sits inside that A7 story. CoinDesk reported that Chainalysis had put the A7 network's processed volume near $120 billion and described A7A5 as a stablecoin used for sanctions evasion. TRM Labs, in its May analysis of the UK designations, said Huobi had sent more than $4.9 billion to UK-sanctioned and A7-network entities since 2021, including $1.13 billion in the 14 months after Garantex's March 2025 takedown. The UK government sanctioned Huobi Global SA in May, saying a major global exchange was suspected of channeling more than $1.5 billion back into the Kremlin's hands. Brussels followed two months later.
HTX is the biggest name on the list, but it is not alone. Chainalysis identified the 14 entries as including Rapira, Aifory Pro, ABCeX, WhiteBird, NoOnecrypto, Tradex, Monease, BitPapa, Exnode, HTX, EXMO, A7 Nigeria, A7 Africa, and PilotFinance. Look at EXMO. The exchange said on July 14 that UK sanctions had almost completely paralyzed its operations, frozen some user assets through third-party custodians, and forced it into an orderly wind-down. New account registrations are closed. Deposits are no longer processed. Trades are restricted to closing positions only.
The country tool changes the threat
The 14 named platforms are the immediate story. The country-level authority is the longer one. Until now, the EU's crypto sanctions mostly worked firm by firm: designate an exchange, cut the transaction route, and wait for the next service to appear. The new mechanism lets Brussels put pressure on the jurisdiction itself if regulators there allow Russian sanctions evasion networks to keep operating. Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, the UAE, you name it, the message is no longer limited to one company registration.
That is the pressure point. A local regulator can tolerate a questionable exchange when the cost sits with that exchange. It becomes a different calculation if the whole national crypto sector risks losing EU counterparties. The Financial Action Task Force uses grey-listing to push countries into cleaner controls, but the EU's version is narrower, faster, and tied directly to Russia sanctions.
Ilan Shor's name explains why Brussels is no longer pretending this is just normal exchange risk. The Centre for Information Resilience reported that A7 is majority owned by Shor, the Moldovan political figure and businessman convicted in Moldova over the roughly $1 billion theft from the country's banking system. Elliptic has also described A7 as 51% owned by Shor, with Russia's state-owned Promsvyazbank holding the other major stake. That is not a vague crypto compliance concern. It is a payments network tied to sanctioned finance, Russian state banking, and a stablecoin built for cross-border settlement outside Western rails.
August 23 is close
What happens on August 23 is simple on paper: EU-regulated firms must stop processing transactions involving the 14 named platforms. In practice, it means any exchange with indirect exposure through liquidity providers, settlement routes, custodians, or euro on-ramps needs to trace those connections now. Thirty days is not much time. Frankly, for larger counterparties that still run sanctions reviews on quarterly cycles, it may not be enough.
HTX did publish a statement after the UK action, saying the designated Huobi Global SA entity was distinct from the online HTX exchange and that global operations were unaffected. Reuters reported that HTX had not responded to a request for comment on the EU sanctions. That distinction matters. HTX can argue about corporate separateness, but EU compliance teams have to follow the legal entry in front of them, and that entry names HTX with Huobi Global SA.
The ban still lands. For traders using HTX to move between crypto and euro-denominated rails, the practical question is not whether Brussels has solved sanctions evasion. It has not. The question is whether your counterparty, custodian, or payment provider decides the risk is now too obvious to touch.
Also read: The EU can now cut off an entire country from crypto with a single decision • Bankr bot's return to X after suspension exposes how fragile crypto's social layer really is • More than 70 crypto projects have quietly shut down in 2026 and the funding wall is not done
