Popular cryptocurrency exchange Huobi has announced it’s set to open a gateway that’ll allow Turkey’s residents to buy cryptocurrencies using the lira (TRY), the country’s fiat currency.
According to the exchange’s announcement, the fiat gateway will be open by the end of this year, and will start off with a TRY/USDT trading pair, which means users will be able to buy the stablecoin right after depositing fiat currency.
The stablecoin can then be used to buy other cryptocurrencies using the trading pairs supported on Huobi Global, the group’s trading platform for international users. Huobi is offering Turkish users a 50% discount on transaction fees, which can drop to 0.07% if users hold its Huobi Token (HT).
Livio Weng, the CEO of Huobi Global, stated:
Turkey is an important region for us, and we plan to bring Huobi's six years of industry expertise, advanced ecosystem, and a standard of trust to the market, and trigger key conversations around long overdue for a thriving crypto community.
The announcement notes that Turkey has over the years evolved into a “thriving crypto-friendly nation and a theater of commerce for exchanges and blockchain businesses.” The Turkish government has announced plans to create a national blockchain infrastructure, to aid in the deployment of this type of technology.
It adds that 20% of Turkey’s residents own cryptocurrency, presumably citing data from a survey conducted by German data firm Statista, conducted earlier this year. The study found 20% of Turkish respondents owned cryptocurrency, compared to 101% in China and 5% in the United States and United Kingdom.
Notably, only 3% of the survey’s respondents owned cryptocurrency in Japan, a country that has been accepting bitcoin as legal tender since April of 2017.
Featured image by Daniil Vnoutchkov on Unsplash.
