Russian residents can use a growing number of online platforms to purchase cryptocurrencies with local fiat money, Bitcoin News writes.
However, established cryptocurrency exchanges are not the most trouble-free option, as they often require extensive registration and rarely support popular payment methods in the region, unlike small online exchangers and peer-to-peer platforms, the news outlet writes. At LocalBitcoins it is even possible to buy bitcoin with credit card.
Russia, as а promising market for cryptocurrencies, is no exception. Russian searches for “биткоин” (bitcoin) on both Google and Yandex have been increasing. In the past month, Russian speaking users have been asking the search engines about bitcoin’s current rates in U.S. dollar and Russian ruble and over the past week there’s been a 350% spike in Google queries about the bitcoin cash rate on Google. “Buy bitcoin” is a common keyword combination on Yandex Search.
Bitcoin.com’s Bitcoin Markets tool provides real-time price updates in both dollars and rubles among multiple fiat currencies. The platform is also available in Russian and you can choose your preferred language and currency from the settings. Meanwhile, various Russian sources offer market data for leading cryptocurrencies including specialized websites such as Bitcoininfo.ru, the crypto section of the business news portal RBC, and the analytics page on the Forex broker Alpari’s website.
According to Bestchange.ru, in the past couple of weeks, for example, buying BTC using Qiwi had the largest share of all exchanges, 9%. Selling BTC for funds transferred to a Sberbank account is the second most popular deal, at 8%.
This week, China’s Binance also added the Russian ruble to its peer-to-peer (P2P) trading platform, making it the third supported fiat currency after providing services for the Chinese yuan and the Vietnamese dong.
“Russia is a vibrant market for blockchain and crypto advancement. We strive to provide our Russian users with easy fiat-to-crypto access. P2P trading provides an open marketplace and more flexible access for users to trade multiple cryptocurrencies with other users or merchants in the payment methods they prefer,” CEO Changpeng Zhao said, commenting on the announcement.
