As the price of the cryptocurrency rockets up, search enquiries for “bitcoin” have reached a two-year peak on Baidu, the largest search engine in China, according to the company’s stats.

China is often regarded as the largest bitcoin market, its exchanges OKCoin and Houbi being the most influential trading venues for the digital currency in the world.

The main factors instigating the growth of bitcoin’s popularity on Chinese market are the devaluation of national currency and slowdown of the economy, which prompts a huge investment outflow from the country.

The RMB rate set by the central regulator, the People’s Bank of China, is now at its five years’ lows ($6.6001). According to the Financial Times, China has spent about $470 billion on the support of its national currency since August 2015, when it cut the fixed exchange rate for the first time in many months.

Because of the investment outflows, the capital flight from the country in 2015 reached as much as $680 billion. In 2016, Chinese central bank imposed restrictions on capital flows which lead to a certain stabilisation (the limitations included cross-border transactions control and putting the transfer of amounts over $50 mln under the regulator’s maintenance).

All of these factors are believed to have led to the growth of bitcoin price worldwide.

After the sharp increase over the weekend, which took bitcoin to as high as $700, by Wednesday morning, the rate has adjusted settled at $681.

However, China is by no means the only country where people start looking for information about bitcoin more actively. According to Google Trends, the number of relevant search queries over the last month has reached the year’s maximum. Still, it is yet to surmount the peak reached in December 2013, when the cryptocurrency’s exchange rate reached $1000.

In Russia, according to its most popular engine Yandex,the intensity of “bitcoin” search enquiries is also growing, as the cryptocurrency hit an all-time record on Tuesday at about 40,000 rubles for 1 BTC. But the leadership among the former USSR states in growing interest to bitcoin belongs to Ukraine.





Elena Platonova