The trading volume between BTC and the ruble touched a 9-month high as Russia’s legal tender value plummeted to new lows. This, due to the invasion of neighboring Ukraine. A crypto research company based in Paris, Kaiko produced information related to BTC volumes. This data says that BTC volume pinned to the ruble touched a high of close to 1.5 billion on Thursday, February 25th, the highest level since May 2021.
All of this activity took place on the trading platform Binance, according to analyst Clara Medalie, in an email send to CoinDesk. BTC-hryvnia (Ukrainian currency) volume also rose but not the levels seen in October 2022. BTC-UAH trades only on 2 exchanges at the moment – LocalBitcoin and Binance.
Trends similar to this were seen in USDT-UAH and USDT-ruble trading volumes, according to Medalie. Tether or USDT is the world’s biggest stablecoin by market value. This ensures price stability in the crypto world which is often volatile and maintains it by a 1:1 pegging to the USD. This spike in crypto trading volume based on the ruble happened as investors started dumping the ruble. This activity took place because investors feared strict sanctions by Western countries.
The ruble also plummeted in value compared to the USD by 8% just last week. This drop in value kept going further to touch 28% on February 28th, 2022. This information was released by Bloomberg. US treasury bonds, Gold, USD and the Swiss Franc benefited from this flight to safer havens.
Over the past weekend, US and its European allies levied much harsher sanctions against Russia by denying its banks access to SWIFT. This effectively stops Russia from carrying out any financial transactions. The EU also banned any activity to do with Russia’s central bank so that the country could not sell any overseas assets.
