The total volume of trades between rubles, Russia’s currency, and Tether’s USDT, a stablecoin pegged to the U.S. dollar, almost quadrupled from $4 million on Saturday to $15 million on Sunday, according to digital assets data provider CCData.
The spike occurred just as Yevgeny Prigozhin, leader of the Wagner mercenary group, captured the southern Russian city of Rostov-on-Don and his forces pushed northward toward Moscow in an apparent coup attempt aimed at Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Later on Saturday, the Wagner leader reportedly came to a Belarus-brokered deal with Putin to leave Russia and stop his northward march, and trading volumes between rubles and Tether dropped to approximately $3 million as the conflict de-escalated.
This isn’t the first time trading volumes between rubles and USDT have skyrocketed. Shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine, in late February 2022, the trading volume between Russia’s currency and the largest stablecoin by market capitalization soared. It peaked to above $37 million, per data provider Kaiko, which only pulls trading data on rubles and USDT from crypto exchanges Binance and Huobi after a slew of exchanges delisted the ruble following broad-based sanctions against Russia. (CCData pulls volume on the trading pair from Binance and Huobi as well as Bitextbook, Coinsbit, Exmo, Graviex, and HitBTC.)
“Overall, volumes are way down since the invasion last year,” Clara Medalie, Kaiko’s director of research, told Fortune.
The flight to stablecoins is common in countries with ongoing crises that impact the dollar value of their national currencies. The Russian ruble quickly devalued after Putin ordered an invasion of Ukraine. (It, however, soon bounced back.)
Amid an ongoing economic crisis, Argentina also saw a large spike in trading volume between the Argentinian peso and stablecoins like USDT and Circle’s USDC. And stablecoins have drawn consistent interest from those in Venezuela suffering from a yearslong economic crisis.
