When President of Turkey Recep Tayyip Erdoğan replaced the head of the central bank in March 2021, thousands of people rushed to convert the Turkish Lira into cryptocurrencies.
There are two largest crypto exchanges in the country, Paribu and BtcTurk, and they are trading over $1 billion worth of cryptocurrency every day. The 11 most popular crypto exchanges in the country have a $6 billion aggregate trade volume as per the local Turkish media.
The interest of Turkish people and specifically research centres has increased drastically.
“From the very beginning of Bitcoin, Turkish people have been eager for and interested in cryptocurrencies, so it is not a new thing like in Venezuela or Argentina”, said a lecturer at the Kadir Has University in Istanbul, Turkey.
In 2020, the Turkish Information Technologies and Communications Authority published a report stating that more than 2.4 million Turkish individuals trade-in cryptocurrency, making up 3% of Turkey’s population.
Note that the average daily registrations of Turkish users on the British cryptocurrency exchange CEX.IO since 14th March are 783% more than in February, according to the company’s managing director.
Since Turkey has no regulations for traditional crypto exchanges, peer-to-peer (P2P) crypto trading platforms such as Binance and Coinbase have seen traffic increase since January 2021.
It is noteworthy to mention that between 2019 and 2020, new registrations on crypto exchanges rose 10%, while in February this year, they were 3x times higher than the average month in 2020, according to CoinDesk.
