In the last week, there has been a new peak in weekly trading in Japanese yen on LocalBitcoins.
5.5 million yen were traded in only 3 days, in the period from Saturday, October 20th, 2018 till today. The previous peak of February 2016, with 5,540,962 in 7 days will soon be exceeded: in the last 3 days, in fact, 5,510,333 yen were traded for bitcoin on LocalBitcoins.
The figure traded is actually small, only 8 BTC (about 52,000 dollars), but the trend of this growth began at the beginning of September and continued until this new peak at the end of October.
Then again, in March of this year, the yen began a downward trend against, for example, the US dollar, which became more pronounced during the last week, and in particular since October 19th.
Also on Liquid, an exchange that accepts yen and on which large volumes of yen are traded for BTC, there was a peak of purchases of bitcoin in yen on October 16th, the highest of 2018, although in the following days the volume of purchases fell back to the average values of the year.
Japan is by far one of the most open countries towards bitcoin, so much so that it is the only country in the world to have officially recognised it as a currency.
It is not possible to draw significant conclusions from these data, although they suggest that there may be some unidentified dynamics in place that are convincing more and more Japanese to buy bitcoin.
If this dynamic is not random and transient, the purchase volumes should remain high in the next few days.
