Russians are flocking to crypto platforms in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to salvage their wealth, asking crypto companies to liquidate billions of dollars.
Similarly, some of them wish to purchase real estate in the UAE, while others want to convert their assets into fiat currency to conceal them.
Russians Making A Beeline To Dubai:
In the last 10 days, an exchange has received an excessive number of inquiries from Swiss brokers regarding the liquidation of Bitcoins worth billions of dollars as they are concerned that Swiss authorities may freeze the cash. The demands were all for $2 billion or more, according to the firm.
According to the platform’s executive, they receive one significant transaction request every month on average, and he said, “In the last two weeks, we’ve got maybe five or six. They haven’t all come off yet – one of them fell over at the last minute, which isn’t uncommon – but we’ve never had this much curiosity before.”
In addition, the executive said, We have one person — I’m not sure who he is, but he came through a broker – who says, “We want to sell 125,000 bitcoin.” What? I think to myself. Guys, that’s $6 billion. “Yeah, we’re going to send it to an Australian business,” they say.
On the other hand, the Swiss market supervisor has declined to comment on crypto transaction volumes.
According to the country’s Secretariat of Economic Affairs (SECO), digital assets are subject to the same restrictions as traditional holdings of Russian users and individuals, therefore money of sanctioned persons must be frozen in Switzerland.
For Russians, Dubai Turns A Safe Haven:
Dubai, a Gulf economic centre with a burgeoning crypto industry, has refused to pick sides between Moscow and its Western friends. This has given Russians a chance to salvage their investments in the country.
In addition, a real estate broker who worked with a cryptocurrency business to allow customers to buy at their leisure stated: “We’ve seen a lot of Russians and even Belarusians arrive in Dubai with anything they can carry, including cryptocurrency.”
Many people have been buying houses in Dubai using cryptocurrencies to safely move their money out of jurisdictions in the Gulf state, according to a financial source in the UAE. Cryptocurrency exchanges throughout the world are banning Russian accounts that the West has sanctioned as a result of the Russia-Ukraine war, dubbed “Special Operation” by Russia.
Similarly, the world’s largest crypto exchanges, such as Binance and Coinabase, have opted to abide by the sanctions, claiming that they do not want cryptocurrencies to be used as a means of evading the sanctions.
Cryptocurrencies, on the other hand, provide users with a great level of anonymity. That is why, this week, European powers like Estonia and Germany asked for more oversight to uncover such vulnerabilities and avoid penalty evasion.
