Brazil inflation leads to increased Bitcoin trading volumes

Brazil’s inflation rate raised to its highest level in four years which spiked Bitcoin’s trading volumes. The inflation rate has reached 4.58%. Since President Jair Messias Bolsonaro took office on January 1, 2019, Brazil’s inflation rate has spiked upwards. The Rios Times states:

“The latest result of the IPCA was the highest for the month of March since 2015. The IPCA, which measures the country’s official inflation, rose by 0.43 percent in February, and 0.09 percent in March of last year.”

Right before the announcement of the inflation, Cointrader Monitor, a monitoring tool that analyzes Bitcoin price movements in the country, announced that Brazilian cryptocurrency exchanges traded more than 100,000 BTC on April 10, 2019. This surge in trading volume happened despite the country’s regulators and traditional banks doing everything in their power to disrupt Bitcoin exchanges. Recently, Santander shut down the account of the Bitcoin Max exchange. This decision was reversed by another judge last February as Santander had failed to provide “prior written communication of the intention to terminate the contract.”