In addition to the huge amount of cryptocurrency donations in this Russia-Ukraine conflict (accounting for more than half of the total donations), the crypto's involvement in the sanctions has also sparked widespread concern. With the announcing of the launch of US sanctions against Russia, crypto giants have now been forced to take a stand. Unlike voluntary and active donations, participation in sanctions goes against the DNA of the crypto industry and is therefore mostly forced.
First, there are the centralized exchanges. U.S. Treasury officials have explicitly asked Binance, FTX and Coinbase to block the accounts of those subject to sanctions. According to Reuters, French Finance Minister Bruno le Maire said on Wednesday that the EU is seeking to ensure that Russia does not use cryptocurrencies to circumvent EU-imposed sanctions. The EU currently freezes Russian central bank assets as well as disconnects seven Russian banks from the SWIFT financial information system.
CZ said that despite media reports that exchanges will not sanction ordinary Russians and that exchanges will not follow the rules of sanctions; in fact at least Binance will comply with the rules of sanctions. Previously Binance told Bloomberg that it has formed a dedicated global compliance working group that includes world-renowned sanctions experts and is taking the necessary actions to fully comply with any sanctions while minimizing the impact on users. coinbase said in a statement that it will not impose any blanket bans on transactions involving Russian addresses, but will block those that may accounts or transactions involving sanctioned individuals or entities.
Ukraine's Ministry of Digital Transformation sent official letters to eight cryptocurrency exchanges asking them to stop providing services to Russian users over concerns that the digital currency is being used to evade sanctions: Coinbase, Binance, Huobi, KuCoin, Bybit, Gate, Whitebit and Ukrainian exchange Kuna.
Jesse Powell, Co-founder & CEO of Kraken, the second largest compliant exchange in the US, said he understands Ukraine's demand to ban all Russian users' accounts, but we cannot freeze our Russian customers' accounts until we are legally required to do so. But Russians should be aware that such a request may be imminent. Powell, who has a reputation for being outspoken, also said that if we were to voluntarily freeze the financial accounts of residents of countries around the world that unjustly attack and provoke violence, the first step would be to freeze all U.S. accounts. But in reality, that's not really a viable business option for us.
After centralized exchanges, the DeFi world is not immune, especially for entities that are not currently in full decentralized or DAO form and still have companies. In particular, companies whose entities are based in the United States need to be the first to strictly comply. The largest decentralized wallet MetaMask (Little Fox) and ConsenSys, the parent company of Infura, even had an oops incident.
According to Decrypt, Infura is blocking access to all IP addresses in two regions, Crimea and the U.S. East, in order to comply with the new U.S. sanctions program, but a configuration error led to the blocking of Venezuela (now lifted). Other regions currently blocked include Iran, North Korea, Cuba and Syria.
Earlier, José Rafael Peña, identified as a former CoinDesk employee, said that Venezuela's IPs were blocked in Metamask using Infura because they were "not available in certain areas to comply with the law", but could continue to be used after changing nodes. MetaMask subsequently responded that Infura had a misconfiguration this morning, but it has now been corrected. metamask relies on Infura as the default endpoint, but users can change this setting as needed or in the event of any service outages. We apologize for the disruption to people in the inadvertently affected areas.
OpenSea also says that while we apologize to affected artists and creators, OpenSea must adhere to strict policies regarding sanctions laws. We are a U.S. company and comply with U.S. sanctions laws, which means we must prevent people on the U.S. sanctions list from using OpenSea.
In fact, there has been a long history of regulation of DeFi, which has also raised questions about whether it is truly decentralized. Earlier Uniswap came under regulatory pressure to ta
