Crypto Trading in Russia Rises Again as Price Discounts Emerge
Trading in bitcoin (BTC) and the stablecoin tether (USDT) is once again rising in Russia, with trading volume on both coins on Monday breaking their highs from the start of the war in Ukraine. Meanwhile, price discounts have emerged on Russian ruble (RUB) trading pairs, while Ukrainians are forced to pay a premium to move their money into crypto.
On Monday this week, the BTC/RUB pair on Binance – the only major international crypto exchange that deals with both Russian rubles and Ukrainian hryvnia (UAH) – reached its highest trading volume so far since the war started, with BTC 506 (USD 19m) changing hands. That compares to the previous high from the day the war broke out of BTC 437.
The same was also the case for the USDT/RUB pair, which reached a 24-hour trading volume of USDT 37.314m yesterday, up from USDT 34.938m on the day the invasion started (February 24).
Meanwhile, today, Binance announced that the exchange had taken steps to comply with sanctions on Russia, saying that payment cards from MasterCard and Visa issued in Russia, or issued overseas and used inside Russia, will no longer work on the platform.
In addition, Tether’s Chief Technology Officer Paolo Ardoino earlier this month reiterated that the company’s stablecoin is centralized and that it “definitely has to comply with requirements of central authorities.”
“Tether is just a dollar using blockchain as transport layer,” Ardoino said on Twitter at the time.
Meanwhile, in Ukraine, on Monday, volume in the BTC/UAH pair stood at 17 BTC, well below the 79 BTC that were traded on the day the invasion started. Similarly, trading in USDT also remained down from the war peak of USDT 8.696m, with USDT 6.149m traded as of Monday.
However, in Ukraine, multiple cities are
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