The Bank of Russia says that Russian crypto holdings on centralized platforms are still worth billions of rubles, even though the prices are volatile
According to the latest report from the Bank of Russia, Russians still have billions of rubles worth of crypto on centralized platforms, even though that’s almost 16% less than in March.
The central bank says that Russians owned $6.8 billion in crypto on centralized exchanges in April, which is 15.8% less than in March. Even with this drop, Bitcoin is still the most valuable currency, making up 69% of all holdings. Ethereum comes in at 21%, and stablecoins come in at 10%.
The central bank notes that low trading volumes over the past few months are a contributing factor to the decline in exchange balances.
It doesn’t matter what; Russian buyers are still involved in the wider crypto market. The central bank says that web traffic to crypto exchanges in Russia increased by 56.5%, and now 7.5% of all hits to the site come from Russian users. In Q3, flows of crypto assets related to Russian investors increased by 18% and reached 4.8 trillion rubles, which is about $50 billion.
Meme coins bring in new people.
In the report, the central bank also talked about meme coins and said that while these assets have become popular, they are not expected to be big drivers of large-scale investment.
Soon before the news came out, MegaFon, one of Russia’s biggest phone companies, said that web traffic to cryptocurrency exchanges had increased by 8%. This was due to higher Bitcoin prices and changes in local rules. The company reported that web traffic to the 20 biggest cryptocurrency platforms increased by 8 to 10 percent in November compared to October, aligning with a global trend.
MegaFon’s data shows that in early November, visits to swaps like Deribit went up by 126%. Visits to other platforms, like HTX (formerly Huobi) and KuCoin, went up by 24% and 23%, respectively. The statistics show that during the same time period, web traffic to exchanges like Gate.io, Upbit, and Kraken went down.
