25,000 Russian Coinbase User's Sanctioned

Over 25,000 Russian wallets said to be involved in illegal activity, have been blocked by Coinbase.

The company claims these users were found using their own ongoing “proactive investigations” and added that the addresses have been sent to the U.S government to "further support sanctions enforcement."

"In the past few weeks, governments around the world have imposed a range of sanctions on individuals and territories in response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Sanctions play a vital role in promoting national security and deterring unlawful aggression, and Coinbase fully supports these efforts by government authorities," Coinbase's Chief Legal Officer Paul Grewal said in a blog post today.

Grewal’s post says Coinbase’s goal is to help as much as possible with the "critical economic sanctions" imposed upon Russian businesses and individuals amid the invasion of Ukraine.

The exchange is actively looking at all of its tools to stop access to sanctioned individuals and track unusual activity that could be linked to avoidance of the sanctions. Coinbase is already checking possible users against lists of sanctioned individuals or entities and detecting IP addresses in sanctioned areas of the world, like North Korea.   

The case for enhanced sanction compliance efforts within the crypto industry was brought up later in the blog post. Coinbase claims "digital assets have properties that naturally deter common approaches to sanctions evasion."

These properties apparently include the public access of blockchains, which "offer unprecedented visibility into the details of transactions."

Coinbase went on to emphasize the transparency of blockchain technology and the fact that transactions are perpetual and inalterable once they are written into the blockchain.

"In addition to these technical advantages, adoption of digital assets is still nascent, making their use for widespread sanctions evasion—the kind that robs sanctions of their impact—unlikely, a fact recently noted by a national security expert."

In the unprecedented time, we are living in it is hard to posture the impact of these sanctions and what other companies within the industry will follow through with similar actions to Coinbase. 

Some argue crypto is good for the sanctioned, while others claim it shines a bad light on the field as a whole. The clear answer has yet to be amassed, but will most certainly live in the textbooks of tomorrow.