Important facts:
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The purchase price of the stablecoins was higher than that of the blue dollar.
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Some “dens” that exchange cryptocurrencies and fiat money P2P have ceased operations.
Today, Friday, October 20, is the last business day before the presidential election, which takes place on Sunday. Anticipating an increase in dollar demand, the government conducted several police operations in various “dens” across the country. These are unregulated places where pesos are exchanged for foreign currencies and vice versa.
If you take a look at the local press, you can read titles like the following:
- “They raid an exchange office in Nordelta and investigate its connection to the rise of the blue dollar.”
- “Blue dollar: Controls and ‘guards’ downtown and Puerto Madero to keep it below $1,000”.
- “Massa expects further raids on ‘caves’ against ‘speculation'”.
Although these measures focus on preventing illegal trading of foreign currencies in cash (banknotes), Cryptocurrencies have been injected. Many of these “dens” also offer P2P trading service for Bitcoin (BTC), Tether (USDT), and other digital assets.
CriptoNoticias was able to speak with some leaders of P2P cryptocurrency exchanges. They confirmed that They decided to suspend operations at least for a few hours and close their offices to avoid any kind of inconvenience..
According to some comments on social networks, the Binance exchange P2P platform even had a supply of almost zero this morning.
In any case, the checks that CriptoNoticias carried out a few hours later for Binance and other digital exchange platforms stated: Operations were already running normally.
Facing Obstruction of Access to Dollar Bills in the “Caves” The “crypto dollar”, i.e. stablecoins, seems to have been the choice of many. This is derived from the fact that the price of buying USDT, USDC and other cryptocurrencies pegged to the dollar was higher than that of the blue dollar (that is, the informal dollar, as this information portal pointed out hours ago Cash). Such a situation is evidence of increasing demand for stablecoins.
As a result of this and the increase that there was also in dollars, Bitcoin (BTC) reached a new all-time high price of over 30 million pesos in Argentina today.
Sergio Massa: “There will continue to be raids”
The Minister of Economy and presidential candidate Sergio Massa made the following comments interview about the police operations carried out this week. He said that as a result of the raids, the government would inform the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission that “a lot of money is being transferred to ghost accounts in the United States.”
In addition, he assured that he was angry with those who profited from illegal stock market speculation:
“That’s why there was a raid and there will continue to be a raid.” “They are manipulating the value of something that is important to people and laundering money on top of that.”
Sergio Massa, Minister of Economy and presidential candidate of Argentina
This weekend the “crypto dollar” takes center stage
On weekends, the “caves” are not operational, so the price of the blue dollar usually remains frozen until the end of Friday. In this context, the “cryptodollar” becomes relevant because Stablecoins – like all cryptocurrencies – are traded 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
As was the case in August, when the primaries took place, it is possible that the price of the North American currency in its tokenized version will be subject to significant fluctuations, which could become even more pronounced on Sunday evening when the election results are known.