There are more than 25,000 wallet addresses that Coinbase has blacklisted because they are linked to Russian criminals or groups.
In this picture, you can see a crypto wallet where someone can keep money like Bitcoin or NFTs. This wallet has a unique set of numbers and letters linked to it, like the one in this picture.
Workers at a company called Coinbase say they have also given the US government their addresses so it can put sanctions on a lot of Russians and businesses. These sanctions include a ban on financial transactions by many people who live there. Russia took the Crimean Peninsula from Ukraine in 2014. After that, sanctions were put in place to stop them. Because Russia invaded Ukraine two weeks ago, they were brought to the attention of people.
According to Bloomberg, a lot of people in both Ukraine and Russia started to use crypto after that. The invasion caused this to happen. A few Russians have put their money into cryptocurrencies to safeguard it from the plummeting ruble. People in Ukraine did the same thing when their government put martial law in place and stopped e-money transactions like Venmo and PayPal.
A lot of the Russian-linked accounts on Coinbase were flagged because they did a lot of things before the war started. This is why. Since the invasion, there hasn’t been an increase in people breaking the rules on the service, says a spokesman for the company.
Cryptocurrency exchanges are trying to fight off both Ukraine’s government and the people who use them. At least, that’s what politicians in the US and Europe say they’re going to do on the public level.
Russian Users’ Coinbase Accounts Frozen
Some people who work for the world’s biggest cryptocurrency exchange, Binance. They said that if they closed the accounts of Russian users, it would go against the very reason that crypto is there in the first place. That’s what he said last week, as well. Coinbase wouldn’t block Russian users before they could even use it. This is partly due to the ruble’s depreciation and the usage of crypto as a safety net.
In a tweet last week, he said that he thinks everyone should be able to get basic financial services unless the law says otherwise.
Some leaders in the US and Europe are concerned that crypto could be used by Russians to circumvent sanctions. Democratic senators sent a letter to Janet Yellen, the secretary of the Treasury, last week. They wanted to know how the Treasury Department makes sure crypto exchanges don’t do anything illegal in Russia.
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