Stablecoins and Meme Coins Dominate Turkish Crypto Market as Inflation Rages

The Turkish crypto market has experienced significant growth in recent years. Currently, more than half of the population is invested in crypto, according to polls and surveys.

Turkey’s crypto market has seen a lot of growth in recent years. Polls and surveys show that more than half of the country's population is now invested in crypto.

This is also clear from the fact that the Turkish Lira (TRY) is the fourth most used fiat currency in crypto. Several macroeconomic factors are driving this adoption of crypto in the country. As a result, stablecoins and meme coins have become the favorites of Turkish investors, even outperforming Bitcoin.

Stablecoins, Meme Coins Dominate Turkish Trading Volumes

Turkey's inflationary environment has led to a significant increase in the use of stablecoins in recent years, according to a recent report by Kaiko. In 2024, the research firm found that USDT-TRY is the largest trading pair by volume on Binance, with over $22 billion, which is five times more than the next largest pair, PEPE-USDT, at $4 billion.

Interestingly, meme coins surpassed Bitcoin in trading volume this year, suggesting that Turkish traders are also turning to more speculative crypto assets to hedge against currency fluctuations and make gains.

The rising stablecoin usage is also evident in the top Bitcoin trading pairs on BTCTurk, which are BTC-USDT and BTC-TRY.

One of the main factors driving crypto adoption is Turkey's years-long battle with double-digit inflation and currency devaluation, with an average inflation rate of over 40% over the past five years. In response, the central bank adopted an unorthodox monetary policy, cutting rates until June 2023. However, this exacerbated the Turkish Lira's devaluation, which lost over 300% of its value between the end of 2020 and the end of 2023.

Turkey's attempt to normalize its monetary policy after the 2023 elections failed to restore confidence in the TRY, which continued to lose value in 2024, albeit at a slower pace.

Binance Surges Ahead in Turkey Crypto Market

Amidst these economic challenges, Binance has emerged as one of the two largest trading platforms for Turkish traders, thanks to its deep liquidity and low fees. As part of a large-scale zero-fee campaign, it offered no fees on BTC-TRY trades between July 2022 and March 2023.

Offering a wide range of TRY-denominated trading pairs and aggressively adding new pairs over the past few years has helped Binance maintain its lead in the country despite the 2022 crypto bear market. In 2024 alone, Binance introduced 61 new TRY trading pairs, bringing the total to over 200.

Other exchanges, like Gate.io, KuCoin, and OKX, have also entered the Turkey crypto ecosystem, but their combined market share is less than 1%.

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