Russia and other countries’ attempts to dodge sanctions will pump the value of Bitcoin, according to VanEck.

The investment management firm’s analysts Matthew Sigel, Patrick Bush and Nathan Frankovitz made that argument in a Monday note.

“Countries like Russia and Venezuela have already acknowledged BTC’s developing role in international trade,” they wrote.

“We believe that many nations will transition some international trade to BTC as a result of Western nations’ overuse of sanctions, the desire to hedge away dollar risk, and the lack of trustworthy alternative currencies.”

The argument came as US President Donald Trump’s tariffs on some 90 countries have shaved some 20%, or $800 billion, of the global cryptocurrency market since January.

The drop also coincided with a 93% decline in memecoin trading between January and March, VanEck wrote.

Other risk-on assets, such as equities, have also been caught in the downturn. The S&P 500 index is down about 6.6% since Trump took office.

Russia uses cryptocurrencies to trade oil with China and India, Reuters reported in March. Russia is under sweeping sanctions by the US and the EU, focused on Russian energy production but also including crypto exchanges.

Last year, Venezuela’s state-run oil company planned to ramp up its own use of crypto to circumvent US sanctions, per Reuters.

Bitcoin briefly decoupled from broader risk assets in April. While that decoupling proved short-lived, VanEck argued that it is a taste of what’s to come as the cryptocurrency moves towards becoming a safe haven asset.

BlackRock, one of the world’s largest asset managers with $11.5 trillion in assets under management, sees Bitcoin similarly.

“We think of it primarily as an emerging global monetary alternative,” said Robbie Mitchnick, head of digital assets at BlackRock, last fall. “It is a scarce, global, decentralised, non-sovereign asset. It is an asset which has no country-specific risk, which has no traditional counterparty risk.

Andrew Flanagan is a markets correspondent for DL News. Have a tip? Reach out to aflanagan@dlnews.com.