Here's why experts say the crypto market will be just fine despite a possible Russian ban on everything from mining to trading

markets.businessinsider.com:

Alexander Ryumin\TASS via Getty Images

When the central bank of Russia proposed a sweeping ban on cryptocurrency activity on Thursday, digital assets barely skipped a beat. 

Bitcoin even rose around 5% at one point during New York trading hours. 

«There are bigger concerns right now in crypto,» Chris Vecchio, senior strategist at foreign exchange firm DailyFX, told Insider. «What's happening is much more closely tied to global stimulus conditions and central banks pulling back their pandemic era efforts. That, to me, is the prevailing story here.»

The news out of Moscow came amid a rout in US equities as investors continued to fret about a hawkish Federal Reserve and high inflation. 

Vecchio said bitcoin's movement was divorced from Russia, highlighting how the crypto market over the past several months has been moving in conjunction with US equities, particularly high-growth, low-profit tech stocks. 

That dynamic was on display Friday, when bitcoin plunged as much as 10% to a six-month low below $38,000 as investors continued to sell crypto and speculative technology stocks in anticipation of the Fed hiking benchmark rates later this year. 

In explaining bitcoin's muted reaction to the threat from Russia, some experts also pointed to China's aggressive crackdown against crypto last year that prompted a massive selloff across tokens. 

«Who cares?» Alex Lemberg, CEO of Nimbus, a decentralized financial platform, told Insider. «When the biggest guy in the classroom punches you in the face, you're not really worried about the smaller guys.» 

It was China's ban that truly stunned the industry, he said. The Asian superpower, after all, was the world's biggest bitcoin mining nation at the time, according to data from the Cambridge