Meme tokens overtake Bitcoin in Turkish trading activity this year

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

This is evident from the fact that the Turkish Lira (TRY) is the fourth most used fiat currency in crypto. Driving this adoption of crypto in the country are several macroeconomic factors. As such, stablecoins and meme coins have emerged as favorites among Turkish investors, even surpassing Bitcoin.

Stablecoins and meme currencies dominate Turkish commerce

According to Kaiko’s latest report, Turkey’s inflationary conditions have greatly increased the use of stablecoins in recent years. In 2024, the research firm found that USDT-TRY dominates as the largest trading pair by volume on Binance, reaching more than $22 billion, more than five times that of the next largest pair, PEPE- USDT, which has $4 billion.

In particular, meme tokens have surpassed Bitcoin’s trading volume this year, indicating that Turkish traders are also turning to more speculative crypto assets to hedge against currency fluctuations and turn a profit.

The increased use of stablecoins is further reflected in the main Bitcoin trading pairs on BTCTurk, which are BTC-USDT and BTC-TRY.

One of the main reasons driving cryptocurrency adoption is Turkey’s struggle with double-digit inflation and currency devaluation for years, with an average inflation rate exceeding 40% over the past five years. In response, the central bank adopted an unorthodox monetary policy, cutting rates until June 2023. However, this worsened the devaluation of the Turkish lira, which lost more than 300% of its value since the end of 2020 until the end of 2023.

Turkey’s move to normalize its monetary policy after the 2023 elections failed to restore confidence in the TRY, which continued to depreciate in 2024, albeit at a slower pace.

Binance boom in Turkey

Amid economic challenges, Binance has strengthened its dominance as one of the two largest trading platforms for Turkish traders, due to deep liquidity and low fees. As part of a large-scale fee-free campaign, it offered zero fees for trading BTC-TRY between July 2022 and March 2023.

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

Other exchanges, such as Gate.io, KuCoin, and OKX, have made inroads into Turkey’s crypto ecosystem, but their combined market share remains below 1%.

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