Bitcoin Surpasses All Time High in Russia – Trustnodes

On February 24th, bitcoin was 2.8 million rubles with their chart looking similar to the global chart.

After that day however, while bitcoin has been sort of sidewaying at $39,000, it has been on one of the biggest bull run in Russia, green and green day after day.

We can see above the familiar bitcoin chart where there’s an all time high in April 2021 and then in November, but since then, the global price is still about 40% down.

Not in Russia however where they’ve broken new ground and this is in the BTC/RUB pair.

At the official exchange rate, bitcoin’s price is 5.4 million ruble, but on crypto exchanges bitcoin is trading at a discount of about $4,000 as the current price on Binance’s BTC/RUB is $34,500, while the global price is $38,700.

That’s one of the biggest discount we’ve ever seen and clearly speaks to the lack of arbitrage opportunity as you’d need ruble to buy bitcoin in rub, sell it on a global exchange for dollars, turn that dollars into rub, and repeat.

The bottleneck here is probably the exchange of dollars into rubles with Putin implementing strict capital controls and so bitcoin’s price in Russia is detaching from global prices.

The value of ruble has fallen so much however that even with this huge discount, bitcoin has still reached all time high there and is still trading near all time high.

The ruble crossed 160 to a dollar yesterday with it now at 140. It was 24 to the dollar when Putin took over in 1999, and it was 70 to the dollar before he declared war on Ukraine.

All showing just how fragile fiat money can be, while one bitcoin is of course still one bitcoin.