Representatives of platforms for working with digital money spoke about the growth in activity and registrations by users from Russia.
The second wave of coronavirus in Russia will be more intense, said a virologist from the National Research Centre for Epidemiology and Microbiology. He warned that medicine is ready for a new challenge, so society will more easily tolerate the increase in morbidity. The expert predicted that the number of cases of infection will increase in the next week or two, after which it will get steady.
Over the past day, 4082 cases were detected in Moscow. 1,049 patients with COVID-19 have been hospitalized, according to the Moscow authorities. Faced with this problem, the mayor’s office introduced additional control measures over the previously adopted decisions to combat coronavirus.
In particular, from October 9 until the end of the Christmas holidays, the city will suspend the discounted travel of schoolchildren in public transport, from October 9 to 28, free travel will be suspended for Muscovites over 65 years old and citizens suffering from chronic diseases. In the near future, the sale of tickets to theatres, concert halls, and museums subordinate to the Moscow Government will be transferred exclusively to electronic form. All enterprises and organizations of the city are obliged to weekly inform the mayor’s office about the transfer of at least 30% of employees to a remote mode of work.
In the spring, during the period of self-isolation, crypto exchanges recorded increased activity of users from Russia. For example, the Binance exchange saw significant increases in registrations and user activity in March, April, and May. The number of registered traders in April 2020 was twice as high as in December 2019. Representatives of the Garantex and EXMO exchanges also spoke about the increase in the number of registrations.
Now the number of registrations, the amount of deposits, and other parameters continue to grow, noted Dmitry Volkov, CTO of the international crypto exchange CEX.IO. According to him, despite the gradual decline in trading volumes, which has been observed since September, in general, interest in cryptocurrencies is growing steadily.
“Russians are more actively interested in cryptocurrencies than the world average, and this interest is growing. It clearly stands out in comparison with the indicators of other countries,” Volkov stressed.
Gleb Kostarev, director of Binance in Russia and the CIS, also reported on the positive dynamics of user interest in cryptocurrency. He warned that big changes await the world in the event of a second wave of COVID-19. The measures that the countries, in particular the United States, will take are important. This will affect the global economy, the expert warned.
EXMO crypto exchange has also seen a large increase in users since October 1. Its director of development, Maria Stankevich, said that the trading platform noted about 30% more new registrations compared to the July-September average. The company attributes this to two key events:
- the departure of Bittrex from Belarus (the number of verifications of Belarusian users increased by 23%);
- legal action against BitMEX (61% of users who withdraw funds to BitMEX returned them to EXMO).
“As for the possible tightening of the regime and the lockdown, we do not see the influence of these factors on the growth of the number of new users and the increase in the total trading volume, but we assume that if the next stage of mandatory self-isolation is introduced, interest will increase,” concluded Stankevich.
According to Google Trends, there was a sharp increase in searches for the word “bitcoin” in March. However, most likely, these dynamics are due to the fall in the value of the cryptocurrency to a local minimum of $3800. Then, users from Russia showed the greatest interest in the main digital coin in early May and late July.
