Way before the war has started in Ukraine, there have been voices saying if indeed there will be a war, it will have an impact on the crypto market as well. Obviously no one knew back then how much is going to affect the market, but news like this can always create chaos and panic and where there's panic, there's manipulation as well.
Now that the war is real and ongoing for almost two weeks now, quite many people are trying to save what it can be saved and also think long term, trying to find the best store of value for their savings to be on the safe side.
Some smart people in TV have already started to advise people in Europe (my country to be precise) about what to do, how to prepare themselves in case there will be war in our country. I'm not going to go into details, it's enough to highlight what one guy has been saying repeatedly about crypto. In his opinion crypto is the worst decision, because it's not safe, it's a huge bubble that is going to explode very soon and people are going to get hurt.
This is the daily BTC chart on Binance. I wanted to show you a bigger portion of the chart, to see how much the effect of the war is, compared to previous price actions.
If you don't know when the war has started and you are shown this chart, would you be able to point out the effects of the war just by looking at the chart? I don't think so.
On the day of 24 February, when the news broke out about the war starting, we had a green candle on the daily. It is true that we had a few red candles before that but you can't really say it was dumping out of fear for the war. Right now, this sideways action looks pretty normal.
So as store of value, BTC is fine till now (in my very humble opinion). If the situation gets worse, there are some things that we have to take into consideration. Putin's first objective is Ukraine, but there are scenarios saying once Ukraine is occupied, he won't stop as he wants other smaller European countries like Moldova, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and what not. If this happens, the impact on the market will be a bit bigger as it would mean a good part of Europe would be in war and more and more people would be forced to store their values the best way they can. Those who have less, most likely will sell in order to survive, while those well off and wealthy will store their money in crypto.
Russia has been hit with harsh economical sanctions and basically it is pretty isolated from the financial world. I'm not going to go into details about how many companies have left already and how many banks have been cut off of SWIFT. Russians have raided the jewelry stores already in an attempt to try to buy precious metals, to be able to store their money in something that holds its value. I'm pretty sure there are millions holding crypto as well, after all Russia has 145 million inhabitants. I'm also convinced the oligarchs that are also hit hard by sanctions, having their property confiscated, have a nice crypto bag each. Putin also must have a considerable bag of crypto, but I may be wrong here as maybe he's not that smart.
While writing my post came across a tweet from BBC News (World), saying that Crypto platform blocks thousands of Russia-linked wallets. So crypto is a safe option only if you are on the right side. I still think crypto is the best option.