People in Russia are increasingly using cryptocurrency exchanges amid the coronavirus outbreak, as traffic to the trading platforms rose 5.56% in the last week of March, when compared to the average in February.
According to local news outlet RBC, cybersecurity firm Qrator Labs found that the traffic to cryptocurrency exchanges has been on the rise, and linked it to increasing interest in the cryptocurrency space. The traffic increased during a Russian paid holiday, the so-called “non-working week,” which has been extended until April 30 by the country’s president Vladimir Putin.
Qrater Labs, according to the report, also found that there was a significant uptick in traffic to foreign exchange Markets in Russia. Along with the increasing traffic, trading platforms faced a 486% rise in Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks during the last week of March.
This activity came shortly after global markets crashed on March 12-13 over the coronavirus pandemic. The crash saw all major U.S. stock market indices enter bear market territory, while BTC lost about 40% of its value over a two-day period. Since then markets have been recovering.
As CryptoGlobe reported, the crypto market crash led to the highest daily trading volumes ever, according to data from leading cryptoassets data provider CryptoCompare. In its March 2020 Exchange Review, CryptoCompare found most of the trading volume came from lower-tier exchanges, which traded $54.3 billion on March 13, out a total of $75.9 billion traded that day.
The report further found that post trading volumes surged during the first quarter of this year, increasing month-over-month since December 2019.
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