TL;DR Breakdown
- Binance has blocked several crypto accounts linked to Russian users.
- Russians possess about 100 trillion rubles ($124 billion) in digital assets.
Leading cryptocurrency trading firm Binance has closed numerous accounts linked to Russians, precisely relatives of senior Russian officials, as a result of a worldwide sanctions campaign against Russia for its actions against Ukraine.
Binance begins to suspend Russian accounts
The exchange had earlier announced that residents of Russia, people who live there, and firms holding digital assets worth more than 10,000 Euros would be prohibited from trading or making new deposits.
According to a report by Bloomberg, the first accounts were disabled on March 3, while Malofeev’s son had his account shut down this week after being added to the US Treasury’s list of Russian persons subject to economic sanctions on April 20.
Binance’s head of sanctions told Bloomberg that the daughter of Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, as well as his stepdaughter and the president of Ukraine, Petro Poroshenko’s communications director, both had their accounts blocked since Russia attacked Ukraine in February.
Besides that, the crypto account for the son of a Russian oligarch who was indicted by the US Department of Justice for breaching US sanctions has also been banned.
According to Chagri Poyraz, the firm’s worldwide head of sanctions in Vancouver, the exchange is continuing its investigations in order to look for more persons linked with sanctioned individuals who are utilizing its services.
According to Poyraz, Binance blocked a virtual currency exchange Garantex several weeks before the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control targeted the company on March 11.
What’s different is that our compliance screening operations are ‘proactive,’ aiming to detect and deter financial crime risk before any regulatory or legal action is taken against these people or entities.
Chagri Poyraz, Binance head of sanctions.
The invasion of Ukraine has prompted a slew of financial penalties aimed at restricting Russia’s capacity to continue its war. Although the sanctions have, thus far, failed to dissuade President Putin.
Ukraine’s minister of digital transformation, Mykhailo Fedorov, praised the decision in a tweet on Friday, writing, “everyone connected with Putin’s regime will feel the consequences of war.”
Sanctions are hurting Russia’s $124 billion crypto market
Russia is a significant cryptocurrency market. The Kremlin believes that Russians possess about 100 trillion rubles ($124 billion) in digital assets. Many Russians had switched from fiat currency holdings to crypto assets as their currency plummeted in reaction to the country’s economic isolation.
According to data from CryptoCompare, ruble-denominated crypto trading volumes increased dramatically in March, reaching 111.4 billion rubles ($1.4 billion).
