Crypto Trading Volumes in Ukraine, Russia Fall After the Early War Spike

cryptonews.com:

Crypto trading volumes using Ukrainian hryvnia (UAH) as the fiat currency have fallen to nearly their normal levels, despite banking restrictions in Ukraine making fiat transactions in the region increasingly difficult. From Russia, however, crypto trades using the Russian ruble (RUB) still remained well above their normal levels on the crypto exchange Binance this week.

On Binance – one of the largest international crypto exchanges that deals with both Ukrainian hryvnia and Russian rubles – trading volumes in the tether (USDT) / UAH trading pair surged after the war started on February 14.

Since the initial surge, however, volumes in the pair have come down, sitting slightly above their normal level on Thursday this week.

Binance trading volume in USDT/UAH:

"We don’t think it is right for businesses or platforms to unilaterally decide to freeze populations of users’ assets. There are normal Russian citizens in London, New York. Should a bank CEO in London have the power to unilaterally decide to freeze those people’s assets? On what grounds? Just because they don’t agree with the President of their country? What happens if they also do not agree with another head of state in another country? Should they have the power to freeze all assets of citizens of that other country too? Where does this stop? For this reason, it is our understanding that we must follow international sanction lists, and not make up our own," Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao said in a blog post today.

Also, according to him, Russians converting from ruble to crypto weakens the ruble, which weakens Russia’s powers. 

A similar picture was also seen in the bitcoin (BTC)/UAH trading pair, where volume surged to its highest level since October last year on the day