Bitcoin in Turkey tops $100,000 as lira slides

The price of the first cryptocurrency on Turkey’s peer-to-peer market has surpassed the $60,000 mark as the national currency fell about 10%. Data from the p2p trading platform LocalBitcoins shows.

On some exchanges, Bitcoin price rose to 798 344 Turkish lira (about $101,000 at the rate at the time of writing).

Data: LocalBitcoins.

The minimum price of digital gold exceeded 475,000 Turkish lira (about $60,000 at the rate at the time of writing).

Data: LocalBitcoins.

According to Google Trends, the number of Bitcoin-related searches in Turkey rose roughly fivefold within a few hours.

Trend of the popularity of the search query “bitcoin” in Turkey. Data: Google Trends.

The Turkish lira weakened after the dismissal of the third central-bank governor in the past two years, Naci Ağbal. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan made the decision after raising the policy rate from 17% to 19% per year last week, Bloomberg reports.

Over the past three years the Turkish lira has depreciated by more than 50%. As a result, more investors are turning to Bitcoin, with its limited supply, wrote journalist Colin Wu.

This is the third time that the governor of the central bank has been revoked since 2019. In the past three years, the Turkish lira has depreciated by more than 50%, causing more investors to turn their hopes on Bitcoin, which has a limited supply of anti-inflation.

— Wu Blockchain (@WuBlockchain) March 22, 2021

Earlier, the price of the first cryptocurrency in Nigeria rose above $76 000 after the central bank barred financial institutions from providing services to exchanges and crypto-related companies.

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