One great thing about cryptocurrencies is that they’re not restricted to a specific location, a specific industry, or anything specific really. They can be everywhere due to how versatile they are. But this doesn’t mean they’re successful or popular everywhere, there are very specific places that they find complete accommodations in. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves, let’s focus on the topic at hand.
Where does crypto find a perfect place for booming and why is it the Post-Soviet sphere? Well, let’s find that out.
A Way Out
In order to justify this argument, we have to go the long way.
Imagine a Post-Soviet nation that just became independent. It’s 1991 and the world political stage is pretty unstable with a major world power just vanishing in thin air. Because of this, there are economic uncertainties, civil strife, and scrambles for forming governments and getting the country back on its feet. Nobody really thinks of heavily investing in one sphere, all countries were focused on forming a coherent economic system as well as a legitimate government. Many failed, but most were successful and are part of the developed world today.
But all of this strife and sometimes centuries spent under the rule of a country not too keen on industrial innovation does rub off on a population and its economy. Most Post-Soviet nations were decades behind their Western counterparts in terms of industry, manufacturing, and pretty much every other aspect.
And why wouldn’t they be? Most of the West had spent the late 19th and the early 20th centuries working on innovating their industry while Post-Soviet nations remained on the status quo.
As you can see there was a lot of catching up to do but wasn’t an easy task. These countries had to focus on very specific industries in order to stay afloat. For example, Georgia focused on tourism, Armenia went with energy production, Azerbaijan chose oil, Ukraine went with agriculture and etc.
What these countries really needed was something new they could focus on and be the first at no matter what it was. This had to be the tech industry. Luckily Estonia was one of the first to focus on this and now they’re basically the Silicon Valley of Europe.
Then blockchain happened, and almost every Post-Soviet country just lunged at the opportunity to implement it in their economies as fast as possible. Why? Because it was finally something profitable that was relatively new in the world and could be easily implemented and focused on. Here are some examples of how the blockchain sphere looks like in Post-Soviet countries.
Georgia - mining and casinos
Georgia was one of the first countries to see large mining operations within its borders. A large chunk of the population had some kind of mining rig at home for BTC and other cryptos. Once the process became a bit more complicated, the market filtered out, leaving those ready to invest more in expanding their mines. Nowadays, there are only a few companies or individuals focusing on the process. The biggest company currently working on crypto mining in Georgia is BitFury with a few apartment buildings dedicated to housing their mining rigs. Furthermore, reports show that they’re also benefiting from lower electricity prices as well as tax cuts, but that’s just speculation which doesn’t really have anything confirming it.
Another Georgian industry that crypto has comfortably nuzzled into is the gaming sphere. Georgia is a big destination for gamblers due to their lax laws and regulations on casinos and their general disposition towards it. Whereas other countries mostly ban or restrict these operations, the promotion and sale of games of chance in Georgia are as open as selling bread in France for example.
According to experts from CasinoCrunch though, Georgia was not done with its development of this industry, and nor were the casino owners. Although the technology has not been fully implemented on the country’s biggest platforms, talks are in motion to introduce BTC, ETH, and in some cases XRP deposits for clients. Considering that even mobile bank applications have specific deposit methods for casinos (Gaming is an option in the app for payments) it’s likely that either the country’s banks will try to accommodate this niche or the existing crypto wallets.
The ex-prime minister of Georgia, Mamuka Bakhtadze has also commented that Georgia is more than happy to accommodate crypto in its economy, and assured that his administration (which remains relatively the same) will do everything to help Georgia benefit from this technology.
Ukraine - building the world’s blockchain
Ukraine was more than happy to take crypto in its embrace. Why you might ask? Well because it’s one of the most tech-savvy nations on the continent. There are around 200,000 developers currently living in Ukraine working on a slew of projects every day. This may not seem much, but it’s a significant chunk of the country’s workforce.
When blockchain first came into the “mainstream” so to say, Ukrainians were already familiar with it and had worked on expanding it or developing new ideas. Hundreds of projects can be seen coming out of the country every year or so.
Furthermore, even if it’s not directly a Ukrainian blockchain project, it’s likely that a Ukrainian developer is working on it. This is due to a strong outsourcing culture in the country. A large chunk of tech companies there work on foreign projects, quality assurance, maintenance and etc. Authentic, Ukrainian projects are not that many.
When it comes to using these cryptos, Ukrainians are pretty good at it as well. Based on research done by Chainalysis in 2020, Ukraine has one of the largest P2P exchange volumes for cryptos not only in the Post-Soviet sphere but the whole world actually.
It is very likely that Ukraine will soon become the world’s blockchain factory in one way or another. If any Post-Soviet nation was successful at making blockchain their focus industry and their way of disrupting the economy, it was Ukraine.
Russia - on again, off again
Russia’s relationship with cryptos is very hard to pin-point to a specific strategy. There are very confusing claims from government officials. Sometimes they press on regulating it to a point where it can’t thrive, while other times they build it up to be the most important pillar of the Russian economy.
But it can’t be denied that there is crypto and blockchain traction in the country. By all means, the co-founder of Ethereum is Russian, and thousands of projects are based in the country.
All in all, it’s not hard to say that blockchain has made its way to the Post-Soviet world and found a welcoming population there. No doubts exist that this region specifically could be the catalyst for global crypto adoption.
