Russian Central Bank Flags Sharp Rise in Crypto-related Activity
The Russian Central Bank says it has noticed a significant rise in citizens’ transactions on crypto exchanges and peer-to-peer crypto trading platforms.
Per the Russian media outlet RBC, the bank has published a financial stability report, making several observations on Russian citizens’ crypto transactions.
The bank wrote about trends it had noticed from the fourth quarter of the Financial Year 2023 to the first quarter of FY2024.
The regulator wrote that the “total web traffic of Russian users on the websites of the largest cryptocurrency platforms” increased by 16.4% “compared to the second and third quarters of 2023.”
The bank said that Russians made a total of 104.6 million visits to crypto exchanges and P2P sites.
The average monthly number of unique Russian IP address-holders to “major crypto exchanges” also increased by 15.1%, the bank said.
This means that 7% of all the traffic on these major overseas crypto exchanges originates from Russia, the bank added.
However, this is still short of the 9% peak the bank reported in the first quarter of FY2023.
The bank said it had used a tool named Transparent Blockchain to make its calculations.
The tool was developed by the Federal Financial Monitoring Service (aka Rosfinmonitoring), in a bid to fight crypto-powered money laundering.
Russian officials claim Transparent Blockchain lets them identify the “true” identity of crypto users on multiple blockchain protocols.
The Russian Parliament proposes to ban the organization of cryptocurrency circulation in Russia from September 1, 2024, as well as the advertising of cryptocurrencies. Only miners and projects approved by the Central Bank will be able to obtain the right. However, this proposal…
— Wu Blockchain (@WuBlockchain) April
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