Ukraine’s Vice Prime Minister, Mykhailo Fedorov, once again asked cryptocurrency services to block transactions from Russian users.
Fedorov specifically addressed the Twitter accounts of Tether Limited, the Hong Kong-based firm that issues the USDT stablecoin, and Paolo Ardoino, the company’s CTO. Ardoino also serves as the CTO of the cryptocurrency exchange Bitfinex. Fedorov said, “Today, the whole civilised world has united against Russia to economically punish the bloody invaders,” before asking both companies to “stop all dealings with the Russians!” To bring about peace!
Fedorov has consistently called for sanctions to be imposed on all Russian crypto users on Twitter, including regular citizens and not only sanctioned individuals. Despite widespread worldwide support for Ukraine, these appeals have often been received with negative sentiment and have been mostly ignored by the crypto community.
Kraken and Binance have rejected such demands, putting a stop to any action in the form of government-issued penalties. It will be interesting to see how Bitfinex and Tether respond. The link between the two firms is still unknown, despite the fact that they were discovered to be controlled by the “same small number of people” in an examination conducted by New York State Attorney General Letitia James in February of last year.
