Erdogan appeals to crypto and metaverse over falling Turkish pound

For Recep Tayyip Erdogan, it would be better to ally with the devil than to push Turkey into the "arms" of the International Monetary Fund. After all, he pulled the country out of the IMF and, resorting to it again would look like a "defeat" - something that at this stage would not help him politically. That is why the Turkish president is preparing the country to follow the exact opposite path from the IMF, that of cryptocurrencies.

In the last days of 2021, the Turkish president - to be precise, his party - leaked that he was preparing a bill for the control of cryptocurrencies. In the early days of 2022, he instructed his party "wise men" to prepare studies on the use of cryptocurrencies, as well as the opportunities that exist in metaverse, the virtual universe.

A few days later, Tayyip Erdogan would receive El Salvador's President Najib Boukele to sign bilateral agreements. But given that Boukele is perhaps the biggest institutional fan of cryptocurrencies and that El Salvador was the first country in the world to adopt bitcoin as its official currency, as a method of payment, we can imagine where the debate focused.

For Erdogan, cryptocurrencies have everything he's dreamed of. Or, at least, that's how Boukele presented it to him. The president of El Salvador has said many that he considers bitcoin a "weapon" against hyperinflation. And he was "against" the IMF with its choice to invest in bitcoin, as the Fund officially calls on him to abandon it as a means of payment, arguing that it endangers the financial stability, the credibility of the country and the consumers themselves. .

Hyperinflation is currently, perhaps, the Turkish president's main problem. Product prices in the neighborhood are rallying, causing a wave of general dissatisfaction - something that the ruling AKP party is polling. On the other hand, the country's currency, the pound, continues to collapse - it has lost more than 40% of its value since last year - as long as Erdogan insists on directing the strategy of the Central Bank of the country, while it has almost "burned" all its foreign exchange reserves.

And it's something else: Since the IMF opposes the use of cryptocurrencies by governments (as its position on El Salvador has shown), the Turkish president, using it, will be able to prove that he has no intention of even cooperating with the Fund, but also with the forces that make it up, which he has repeatedly pointed out as responsible for the crisis that the country is going through. And especially the US, believing that bitcoin can serve as a tool to decouple the Turkish economy from the dollar.

Surprisingly, last year Turkey took steps to curb the use of cryptocurrencies in the country, a tool widely used by the Turks, who exchanged Turkish lira in their possession for bitcoin and Tether to safeguard their savings. The data of the Paribu platform, which offers the service of exchanging Turkish pounds with cryptocurrencies, increased its users to 5 million people at the end of 2021 (from 1,5 million, a year earlier), with the daily trading volume skyrocketing to the same $ 500 million from $ 20 million.

Paribu's adviser, Turan Sert, however, said when Erdogan welcomed Boukele that "the Turkish administration may hear the bukele rhetoric about cryptocurrencies, but his words will have little effect on what he thinks ".