Russians Are Trying To Liquidate Billions of Dollars in Crypto Assets.
There are indications that wealthy Russians are liquidating their assets using cryptocurrencies. According to a CNBC report filed on Saturday, March 12, cryptocurrency firms in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) have been inundated with requests to liquidate bitcoins worth billions of dollars.
The source said that most of the liquidation requests came from Swiss brokers whose Russian clients are eager to move their funds away from the country. Russians are moving their funds from Switzerland to preempt the Swiss government’s possible seizure of their assets as a sanctions fallout.
The report says that some clients are willing to invest in real estate while others convert their crypto to fiat.
CNBC writes:
“Some clients are using cryptocurrency to invest in real estate in the UAE, while others want to use firms there to turn their virtual money into hard currency.”
According to a Swiss broker whose firm is aware of the deals, the minimum orders that have been requested so far is $2 billion.
The source said that the influx of demand for liquidation started ten days ago. This is not surprising, considering that the Russian invasion of Ukraine that resulted in sanctions against the country commenced days earlier. The war with Ukraine has resulted in destabilizing sanctions on Russia. The energy giant is suspected of having plans to use cryptocurrencies such as BTC to mitigate the effects of the punitive measures against it.
The source said that their company had received five to six requests in the past week, even though none of the orders was successfully filled. He said that the trend represents a five-fold increase in high volume orders.
The company executive told CNBC,
“We have one guy – I don’t know who he is, but he came through a broker – and they’re like, ‘we want to sell 125,000 bitcoin’. And I’m like, ‘what? That’s $6 billion, guys’. And they’re like, ‘yeah, we’re going to send it to a company in Australia,’”
Following the recent stern measures meted on Russia’s banks by western nations, forbidding these financial institutions from accessing the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT), many have suggested that the country could use crypto to evade sanctions.
Ripple CEO Garlinghouse noted that Russia cannot Use Crypto to Evade Global Sanctionsthat because global crypto trading platforms rely on various banking partners who could lose their licenses when a blacklisted nation or individual is able to evade all relevant measures put in place to conduct transactions on these platforms. Garlinghouse stated that cryptocurrency exchanges have established stringent measures, which include requesting their users to abide by KYC/AML requirements, in a bid to stop this unfortunate development from happening.
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