Coinbase to follow partial finacial sanctions on Russian users

The recent economic sanctions imposed on Russia, have been a point of discussion about the residents of the country and the use of their cryptocurrencies.

Coinbase announced in a March 7 blog post that it was committed to complying with the sanctions and, as a result, is developing a multi-layered, global sanctions program. The company said it had blocked 25,000 Russian addresses linked to Russian individuals or organisations involved in criminal activities.

“Today, Coinbase blocks over 25,000 addresses related to Russian individuals or entities we believe to be engaging in illicit activity, many of which we have identified through our own proactive investigations. Once we identified these addresses, we shared them with the government to further support sanctions enforcement.”

Transactions are simple, provide traceable and permanently unmatched transaction data, and businesses argue that transactions recorded on the blockchain may not change and that bad actors may be prevented from withholding information to prevent identification.

Thus to effectively overcome the current sanctions, the Russian government and other licensed agencies require large amounts of digital assets, which is also practically impossible at the moment.

Recently many experts pointed out multiple reasons why Russia could not circumvent sanctions using crypto, the lack of liquidity, anonymity, and the fact that crypto exchanges are subject to anti-money laundering restrictions.

Coinbase also highlighted that the Russian Central Bank alone has $630 billion worth of immobile properties.

“That’s larger than the total market capitalization of all but one digital asset, and 5–10x the total daily traded volume of all digital assets,” the firms said.

As a result, it is more difficult to try to cover large-scale transactions with open and transparent cryptocurrencies than using other existing technologies.

Now, the recent ban from Coinbase is pushing Russians to diversify exchanges such as Binance. In particular, after Ukraine called for a complete ban on important crypto exchanges, Binance said, “it will not freeze all Russian accounts.” If there is a change from Coinbase to Binance in Russia, it will increase the price of its native token BNB.

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