There’s always been a lighthearted debate on what continent that Turkey is apart of, whether it’s Europe or Asia. Either way, the nation now owns more cryptocurrency than any other country in Europe.
This information is known thanks to a recent tweet from the Chief Strategy Officer at CoinShares, Meltem Demirors who posted this to her sum 78.5k Twitter followers:
.@ING_news'e göre, Avrupa ulkeleri içinde Türkler kripto para sahipliginde % olarak birinçi sirada yer aliyor. Türk yatirimcilari ve start-up’larinin bu buyuk basarisindan dolayi bir Türk olarak gurur duyuyorum.
— Meltem Demirors (@Melt_Dem) February 27, 2019
h/t @fundstrat pic.twitter.com/20eTGbdyL0
In a rough translation on Google, we can see that she firstly, proud to be Turkish and based on the ING research, 18 percent of Turks own cryptocurrency. This is much higher than the overall 9 percent average.
In addition to this, she also pays tribute to the great are startups and investors in the country. Even so, there might still a few more reasons why Turkish people are holding onto digital assets.
Even though Bitcoin is a volatile asset it doesn’t change the fact, that Turkey’s currency, the lira, isn’t any different. In fact, even with Bitcoin seeing massive losses last year, the trading volume on Turkish exchanges seems to experience gains of nearly 40 percent.
The lira is currently undergoing a crisis and has been for a while now, and involved the dollar-denominated debt that took place in summer last year which greatly devalued numerous Turkish families life savings. In addition, they also saw their pensions and investments affected in a big way.
Even though this isn’t on a similar level of the likes of Venezuela, the lira did lose 20 percent of its value from one day to the next in August last year. With this in mind, Turkey could be creating the perfect storm for cryptocurrencies.
“With a dwindling economy and devalued national currency, it’s hardly surprising that Turkey takes the lead in cryptocurrency ownership.” In fact, the unknown co-owner of Bitcoin.org tweeted about the huge surge in traffic from investors in Turkey saying that this will be how the leading cryptocurrency will impact the world.
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