Russian users still account for Bybit’s biggest traffic share despite mass account freezes

In June 2026, users from Russia generated 28.6% of all traffic to Bybit, or about 3.09 million visits, even as the exchange’s overall traffic fell 8.9% to 10.81 million. For PSPs and merchants, the interesting part is not the traffic share itself but the mechanism behind it: Bybit has become a compliance-heavy environment where deposits tied to certain payment aggregators and USDT inflows can trigger freezes.

1. According to Similarweb, Russia was Bybit’s single biggest traffic source in June 2026. That is a large share for any global crypto venue, and it matters because it shows how much volume can remain concentrated in a market even when the operational risk keeps rising.
2. Users report mass account freezes after transactions involving payment aggregators such as Capitalist, whose funds are often flagged as sanctioned. For high-risk operators, the practical takeaway is straightforward: if your flow touches intermediaries that are already sensitive on the compliance side, the exchange can end up treating the whole chain as suspicious.
3. Bybit has also tightened KYT (Know Your Transaction) checks. A USDT deposit can now act as the trigger, with the exchange requesting transaction history and proof of source of funds. The source ties this tightening to Tether’s restrictions under MiCA.
4. Providing a full document pack does not guarantee an unfreeze, and the process can stretch for months. That is the part PSPs and merchants should pay attention to: once the exchange has escalated a case into a manual review queue, the user experience stops being a payment flow and starts looking like case management.
5. The source also describes a market for paid “helpers” in chat groups, where affected users look for specialists to resolve blocked-account issues. That creates a second layer of fraud risk on top of the original payment problem, because the person promising to fix the freeze becomes a new counterparty to trust.

The broader issue here is attribution. The source says proving the legitimacy of the funding chain is difficult because many intermediate wallets remain anonymous or are located in offshore jurisdictions. For high-risk payments, that is the familiar end state: the more fragmented the route into the exchange, the harder it becomes to defend the source of funds when compliance teams start asking questions.