MoonPay’s fiat to crypto on-ramp, which was founded less than three years ago, powers more than 250 wallets, websites, and services in more than 160 countries and has handled more than $2 billion in transactions to date. The MoonPay team emailed all clients on March 10th to advise them that, owing to recent events in Eastern Europe, they had halted operations in Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus and were no longer dealing with consumers having physical addresses in those territories.
In an explanation for their latest decision, they stated that it was hard for them to continue operating in these places while adhering to the existing sanctions imposed by governments throughout the world, including the United Kingdom, the European Union, and others.
The user-friendly payments infrastructure serves to bridge the worlds of crypto and traditional finance by delivering solutions in the NFT arena that allow marketplaces such as OpenSea, the biggest NFT marketplace, to offer fast and secure ways to purchase and sell digital assets.
MoonPay’s NFT Checkout, which is available to any brand, creator, or marketplace, classifies tokens as “digital commodities,” resulting in card approval rates that are many times higher than usual crypto on-ramps. With other payment providers following suit, Moonpay’s success as a service for NFT markets is due to its simplicity of connection.
Despite the fact that many cryptocurrency exchanges are resisting government pressure to prohibit Russian customers from their platforms, the sanctions are now having an impact on both sides of the debate. Despite officially supporting all of its users in the face of sanctions, Coinbase blacklisted 25,000 wallet addresses on Monday tied to what it thinks are Russian people and businesses engaging in illicit activities.
Non-US exchanges such as Binance and FTX have argued that safeguarding Russians’ access to crypto is critical, given the ruble’s increasing dependence on digital assets in the face of harsh US and European sanctions.
