Russian rubles are flooding into Tether now, and the popularity of rubble-denominated cryptocurrency pairs is on the rise at major crypto exchanges.
Between February 20 and February 28, Bitcoin volume surged by 243%, from 522 to 1,792 BTC traded via Binance’s BTC/RUB combo.
Russian officials claimed that 2 trillion rubles ($20billion) of cryptocurrency assets were held by Russians.
Similar Article| Bitcoin Staggers After Putin’s Nuclear Deterrence Alert Warning
Crypto-Denominated Pairs Gain Ground
A dramatic spike in volume for the Ruble Pairings in Binance (especially in USDT) was evident on February 28th, when the USDTRUB volume reached a record $35 million.
Bitcoin has seen a significant increase in value. The volume surges could suggest that Russians might be interested in crypto-tokens at a stable price to protect themselves from potential sanctions.
Market makers could be trying to reduce their ruble exposure, which would explain the increasing volumes. Due to circumstantial differences, Ukrainians are looking for crypto exposure during these uncertain times.
SWIFT and Russian Reserves
According to financial commentator Charles Archer, cutting Russia off from the international SWIFT payment network “has rendered Russia’s $630 billion reserves, which are primarily held in foreign currency, worthless.”
Additionally, the Kuna Exchange still offers premium trading for Ukrainian hryvnias swaps. USDT and BTC are also available.
There has been a slight increase in the volume of transactions on the Ukrainian Bitcoins Exchange. BTC now sells at a premium rate in Hryvnia Trades.
Daily chart: Total cryptocurrency market cap of $1.894 trillion| Source: TradingView.com
Similar Article| Chainalysis report: $25 Billion in Crypto Assets held by Criminal Whales
USDT/RUB swaps
Binance reported a total volume $16,871,804 USDT/RUB tradings, $5740,109 Bitcoin/RUB exchanges and $3,429.714 ether Swaps with rubles in the past 24 hour.
The Russian currency is Tether’s (USDT) sixth most traded pair, according to cryptocompare.com trading pair analytics on Tuesday.
USDT/RUB trading accounted to 2.05% of worldwide tether trading in the past day.
Tether (USDT), has a value present of $1.0004 and a 0.137% rise over 24 hours. The market capitalization for Tether (USDT) is $79.475B. At the time of writing, there was a circulating supply at USDT 79.442B.
Trade up Ruble/BTC
According to Kaiko (a Paris-based cryptocurrency research company), the volume of Bitcoin in ruble reached 1.5 billion RuB on Thursday.
Trading volumes between the Russian ruble and bitcoin hit a nine-month high as the country’s fiat currency plummeted to new lows after the Ukraine invasion.
Tetherruble and the volumes traded by tetherhryvnia also showed similar patterns.
Bloomberg data shows that the Russian currency lost more than 8 percent to RUB90 per US Dollar last week, and another 28% on Wednesday, making it to a low of $18 per USD.
Featured Image from The Independent. Chart from TradingView.com