This is very good news for the people in Turkey who want to have an easier way to escape from their currency to bitcoin hehe.
When I read the article I did not get the impression that some good news could be expected - because what will happen better than what already exists? Anyone can buy cryptocurrencies quite legally in Turkey, and statistics say that Turks mostly buy stablecoins, not Bitcoin. The only good thing would be to lift the ban on cryptocurrency payments that has been in place in the country for some time.
The status of cryptocurrency exchanges matters because Turks increasingly use them to sell the Turkish lira for U.S. dollar-pegged stablecoins, according to Bayraktar.
I speculate FTX’s CEO Sam Bankman-Fried was one of the people who made some encouragement for the Turkish government to do this. FTX has been advertising their plans for Turkey in social media hehe.
Do you think that the CEO of crypto exchange calls President Erdogan and suggests what to do about the cryptocurrency in Turkey? That’s a little too much though, even for speculation.
Gotta be frank, not abreast with developments there but I do know from connexions that the Lira's on a death spiral, something like 50% value loss in past few months?
The Turkish lira has fallen by 34% against the U.S. dollar this year but has gone up by 41% this week after a precipitous drop earlier this year, according to TradingView. The greenback is widely seen as a store of value in Turkey, where the local currency sometimes trades like a volatile memecoin.
Down and up and so on for years, I no longer see it as something to wonder about. In my opinion, there are only two options as to why this is happening:
- the first is that the Turkish government is very incompetent and the country is run by completely incompetent people.
- another reason is that there are factors in the country that want to destabilize the country, remnants of coup attempts that have outside support.