Jesse Powell Declines Ukraine’s Request to Freeze Russian Users Crypto Addresses

In light of the Ukraine crisis, major crypto exchange firms including Binance and Kraken have responded to the pleas to freeze Russian users’ crypto addresses. Ukraine’s Plea to Crypto Exchange Firms On February 27, Mykhailo Federov – Vice Prime Minister of Ukraine took to Twitter to urge crypto exchanges to freeze the crypto addresses of Russians. The request came days after both U.S and EU decided to remove Russian banks out of SWIFT and freeze overseas assets of Russia’s Central Bank. I'm asking all major crypto exchanges to block addresses of Russian users. It's crucial to freeze not only the addresses linked to Russian and Belarusian politicians, but also to sabotage ordinary users. — Mykhailo Fedorov (@FedorovMykhailo) February 27, 2022 Fedorov continued tweeting about firms freezing accounts of Russian and Belarusian users. One such startup, DMarket specializes in NFT and virtual in-game items in Metaverse was praised by Fedorov for the same. Received breaking news. @dmarket, a platform for trading NFT & In-game Metaverse items, decided to freeze the accounts of users from the Russian Federation and Belarus. Funds from these accounts could be donated to the war effort. Nowadays Robin Hoods. Bravo. — Mykhailo Fedorov (@FedorovMykhailo) February 27, 2022 Crypto Exchanges Response to Ukraine Jesse Powell, CEO of Kraken stated in response to Ukraine’s plea that although the sentiment is duly respected, they cannot block Rus...