The unbanked residents of Afghanistan are forced to purchase cryptocurrency for trade and credit operations.
Cryptocurrency investor and international journalist Farhan Hotik from the Afghan province of Zaboud reported that amid US sanctions, locals are increasingly providing themselves with everything they need to live or emigrate from the country using digital assets.
“After the Taliban came to power, cryptocurrency spread across Afghanistan like wildfire. There is practically no other way to get money, ”says the journalist.
The crypto investor writes that he lost all fiat money after the Taliban came to power and with the introduction of US sanctions. The only source of funds, thanks to which he managed to eventually leave Afghanistan, was bitcoins. He converted cryptocurrency into cash and managed to find refuge in Pakistan with his large family. Hotik says he uses peer-to-peer transactions for his friends who are still in Afghanistan.
Sanzar Kakkar, the creator of the cryptocurrency app HesabPay, said that the Afghan crypto revolution is linked to US sanctions against the Taliban:
“We are using cryptocurrency to try and solve the problem of the 22.8 million Afghans who are facing poverty, including the one million children who could starve to death this winter.”
Kakkar added that p2p mobile cryptocurrency apps allow Afghans to transfer money and pay for goods. Transactions are not dependent on banks and are protected from the Taliban.
With the advent of the Taliban, the US authorities imposed sanctions that stopped all transactions with Afghan banks. Along with stopping the transfer of dollars, the US authorities seized $7.1 billion of Afghan-owned assets.
The Afghan banking system was disconnected from Swift’s worldwide interbank financial system, leaving banks unable to conduct international transactions. As a result, banks stopped serving citizens.
As a result, local residents began to use cryptocurrency for trading. According to Chainalysis data, in 2021 Afghanistan has risen from 154th to 20th place in the table of countries in terms of the level of adoption of cryptocurrencies.
According to the Russian crypto business, against the background of high inflation and restrictions on the purchase of US dollars, the popularity of cryptocurrencies, in particular Bitcoin and the stablecoin Tether (USDT), is growing in Russia. In early March, the Biden administration reminded crypto exchanges that Russian users on sanctions lists should not receive services for trading and exchanging digital assets. At the same time, the director of strategy at CoinShares, Meltem Demirors, said that cryptocurrency is global non-political money.
Source: Bits
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