- Coinbase blocked 25,000 Russian illicit accounts to comply with their company’s policies to act against bad actors.
- They believe everyone deserves access to basic financial services unless the law says otherwise, says CEO Brian Armstrong
- While a lot of entities are constantly showing efforts against Russia, some are acting, in contrast, giving their reasons.
There was news regarding one of the major cryptocurrency exchanges, Coinbase blocking around 25,000 illicit accounts from Russia apparently.
Now the exchange has highlighted something that puts the reason for it to do so under skepticism. The whole world is aware of the war ongoing between Russia and Ukraine, and this act of Coinbase might indicate that it is showing its efforts against Russia.
Not Really Related to Russia?
The executives and employees of the exchange have cited that this action has nothing to do with the war but an attempt to fight the frauds and illegal behavior in the virtual currency industry. The digital trading platform has stated that while it respects all the sanctions by the US against Russia, the action got nothing to do with those sanctions and was a part of the platform’s policies to battle bad actors.
Although the company has taken this move, it says it won’t block everyday users from utilizing the services in Russia.
CEO of Coinbase, Brian Armstrong highlighted that they are not preemptively banning all the Russians from using Coinbase and that they believe everyone deserves access to basic financial services unless the law says otherwise.
Many sectors in the US including the oil to the traditional banking systems have cited they would end services in the country.
Whereas, some exchanges from South Korea like UpBit, Gopax, etc have also blocked IP addresses from Russia. A lot of entities in the crypto industry are acting in contrast to the former ones though.
For Instance, Kraken, a San Francisco crypto exchange, refused the request of the Vice Prime Minister Mykhailo Fedorov to freeze addresses of Russian users saying that they can’t do so unless legally asked to do so. The idea was to support the citizens who aren’t even involved in Putin’s act of invasion, as the Russian Ruble has fallen highly due to the war.
Binance issued a statement last month highlighting, Crypto is designed to provide greater financial freedom to the people globally and to unilaterally decide to ban people’s access to their crypto would fly in the face of the reason why crypto exists.
On the other hand, Coinbase and many of these entities have stated that they won’t cut down the access of the average traders to their services and features. They will do what they can to freeze the trading activity of the Russian nationals that are on the sanctions list of the US and its allies.
The war is getting mixed efforts from individuals and entities, and making efforts against Russia in terms of crypto industry might be the right ones to take, but does banning access from crypto actually facilitates it to stay true to its decentralised nature?