Malta-based Bittrex International stated that the exchange will deny access to trading from October 29 onwards, requesting them to withdraw their account balances with the exchange before the last date.
Without providing a precise reason, the global trading platform of Bittrex has sent notice to all its customers in Venezuela that it will terminate its services by this month end.
Notably, Venezuela is among the 31 countries which will not have access to Bittrex services. This includes Afghanistan, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Egypt, Cambodia, Ivory Coast, the Central African Republic, Uganda, Ethiopia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Tunisia and Yemen.
As previously reported, Venezuela has become more reliant on decentralized cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin (BTC) in order to avoid sanctions by the U.S. Venezuela’s national oil-pegged cryptocurrency, Petro (PTR), was also purportedly designed to allow the country to gain access to new forms of international financing as well as to skirt sanctions.
In early September, Bitcoin trading volumes in Venezuela touched a new high, with volumes on P2P exchange LocalBitcoins jumped 48%. On the first of this month, two Venezuelan firms have collaborated to unveil a crypto debit card and pont-of-sale system backing Bitcoin (BTC), Dash (DASH), Ether (ETH) and Petro.
Interestingly, the US based cryptocurrency exchange Poloniex stated that it is separating from parent company Circle to setup a new exchange that will not offer its trading platform for US clients.