The Kremlin believes the number of crypto transactions conducted in Russia has risen by three times in 2023, with transfer volumes “doubling.”
The claims were made by Yuri Chikhanchin, the head of Rosfinmonitoring, in an interview with the Russian media outlet Izvestia.
Formally known as the Federal Financial Monitoring Service, Rosfinmonitoring is a Kremlin-run agency that combats money laundering and terrorism funding in the country. Chikhanchin said:
“We are seeing a significant number of transactions being conducted with cryptocurrency: The number of transactions has increased several times over the course of the year. According to our data, the number of [crypto] transactions conducted in Russia in the first nine months of the year exceeded 185,000.”
The agency claimed that in the first nine months of 2022, it had identified 60,000 crypto transactions using its monitoring tools.
Chikhanchin also said that Russians are now sending and receiving more crypto than ever before, conceding that “the volume of transactions” had “almost doubled” this year.
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