Metamask accidentally bans Venezuelan and Iranian users
It may sound like a hard title to believe because cryptocurrencies are known as decentralized structures that governments cannot get their hands on. Or rather, they were known, it seems that they are not as decentralized systems as we thought.
Yes, cryptocurrencies themselves may be decentralized (which is even a debatable topic), but the applications that develop the interface that allows us to use these cryptocurrencies are not as decentralized as we think.
As you know, Russia recently declared war on Ukraine. While most of the countries of the world took their place on the side of Ukraine, they decided to impose heavy sanctions on Russia. As can be expected, the heaviest of the sanctions came in the economic field. Russia was banned from many banking systems, including swift.
Cryptocurrencies have also had their share of these sanctions. Many global exchanges began to suspend Russian citizens' accounts and confiscate their funds. However, our topic is not the seizure of the funds of Russian citizens. A completely different side of this issue, after all, these funds were already stored in centralized exchanges.
Our main topic is to prevent access to the DE-CENTRALIZED wallets of citizens who have nothing to do with this war, such as Venezuela and Iran. As you know (or don't know), Venezuela and Iran became one of the rare countries that supported Russia after Russia started to invade Ukraine.
World countries started to include these two countries in their sanctions against Russia, and Metamask, the most popular cryptocurrency wallet application, got its share.
Metamask is a cryptocurrency wallet developed by a US-based firm called Consensys and has millions of members. It supports all cryptocurrencies using the Evm ecosystem, mainly ethereum.
Iranian and Venezuelan users who tried to access the metamask account yesterday received a warning that the metamask could not be used in their country, and they started lynching metamask on twitter. They weren't exactly wrong about that.
Metamask officials, who made a statement after being lynched on Twitter for a while, said that the problem was caused by a Node named Infura and apologized.
Although the problem has been solved for now, it would be a lie if we say that people have not started to have questions about the decentralization of the cryptocurrency ecosystem.
What simple citizens have to do with the war. It's funny to hear such funny mistake from metamask team, they did that by purpose, I live in Russia, and I'm against the war, why I have to be put under sanctions and other incent citizens. While the leaders will enjoy their lives.