CoinDesk Global Macro Editor & CoinDesk TV Anchor Emily Parker joins Yahoo Finance Live to discuss bitcoin rebounding, the Russian economy, and the outlook for cryptocurrency.
Video Transcript
– Bitcoin is surging, as more investors are looking to put their money into something that’s not Fiat, Bitcoin currently at about 43,500. Remember, that’s a far jump from where we were over just a week ago, when we were at close to 37,500. And it appears more Russians are converting to crypto as well.
According to data from Cryptocompare, Bitcoin trading denominated in the ruble, skyrocketed after the invasion in Ukraine started on Thursday, jumping over 250% from the day before that. Joining us to discuss is CoinDesk Global Macro Editor Emily Parker. Emily, your thoughts on just the broad price movements over the last few days.
EMILY PARKER: Yeah, so with the obvious disclaimer that we never know what moves Bitcoin’s price, there are a lot of conditions right now that are definitely ripe for crypto adoption. So if you look at Russia specifically, you have reports of long lines at ATMs as people are racing to withdraw cash. The ruble is basically collapsing.
People are looking for a safe haven asset. Bitcoin is supposed to be a safe haven asset. That’s generally part of its philosophy, is that it’s a hedge against this kind of risk. So it would make a lot of sense. But that’s not the only use case for cryptocurrency right now. It’s also being used for donations worldwide.
For example, Ukraine has asked for donations in cryptocurrency. And they’re getting them, something like at least $16 million US have been sent to Ukraine via cryptocurrency. And a lot of that a lot of that cryptocurrency has already left the wallets and is being deployed. So you also have the Russian opposition movement is also raising money in crypto. So there are a lot of use cases for crypto right now, which is a relatively fast and efficient way to move money across borders.
– Yeah, as you pointed out, Emily, being used on both sides in the situation here. But I kind of want to ask about how some of the private companies are dealing with some of the political headlines here, because Ukrainian politicians have asked some of these exchanges to freeze Russian, Belarusian in some cases, crypto accounts, and Binance being one example of a company that’s essentially said no we’re not going to do that. Do you expect these types of calls to ramp up? And kind of how are you viewing the response from some of these exchanges?
EMILY PARKER: I do think that these calls for this kind of thing will ramp up because a very popular narrative in the media right now is the use of crypto for sanctions evasion. We don’t know how effective crypto will be for that purpose. But yes, I do think we will see calls like that. I think, Binance, I think their position makes sense.
As far as I understand it, Binance’s position was we are happy to comply with blocking sanctions accounts, but we’re not going to just block the accounts of any Russian, because you first and foremost, I think Binance’s argument is this really sort of violates the spirit of crypto. But second of all, there are so many ordinary Russians that are against this war and who vehemently oppose this war. And it would just be punishing a lot of ordinary people who really did not want this to happen at all.
– Right, and that’s kind of complicated, because if you don’t do a ban wholesale, then you’re trying to pick and choose whose accounts. And the whole point of these crypto accounts is to keep it anonymous. So I guess on that point, and this is going to be a bit of a tough question, I guess, because every country has their own regulations when it comes to AML or other types of supervision over this type of field, but do you think there’s any viability that there really could be a framework for wanting to do this, even if some of these exchanges wanted to kind of do what the Ukrainians are asking?
EMILY PARKER: Well, you know, I think the larger question here is how effective is cryptocurrency really in avoiding sanctions? And I don’t think– if we’re talking about large scale sanctions evasion, I think one of the big myths about Bitcoin is that it’s completely anonymous. That’s actually not true. As we’ve seen with some of the big Bitcoin hacks, a lot of those criminals have been identified by law enforcement by looking at blockchain data.
I mean, sort of the whole idea of the blockchain is that it’s transparent and that Bitcoin transactions are recorded. So it takes time. It takes effort. It takes skill. But there are ways to identify sanctioned accounts or sanctioned wallets. So if somebody is trying to move a huge amount of money from one country to another, I don’t think it’s that easy to do that in a way that nobody is going to pick up on.
