We all know about the current state of affairs in Eastern Europe.
Please, do not turn this post into a political affiliation declaration or anything like that, this is about crypto and blockchain and how politics may or may not affect entities that are based on them. The problem is, nowadays everything is political or revolves around politics to some degree but please, don't take this post as a political statement, I'm trying to analyze - perhaps in a shallow way - the crypto side of the events.
But, isn't one of the main pillars of crypto to be impervious to political pressure and that code is law, right?
The problem lies here: A lot of Blockchain related companies are based on safe haven countries where the laws of men can't be coerced into action that much, but some others aren't. For example, Binance US is based on the USA and thus, their recent KYC implementation came because the US law demanded it.
And then we have other types of pressure, such as social justice or morale.
This takes me to the topic I mentioned on the first paragraph. The situation between Ukraine and Russia has reached the crypto world - not in terms of price, we know that got affected a week or so ago - and it does so in a way that a big part of the crypto community is against: The Ukrainian VP reached out to exchanges and asked them to block accounts from Russia, petition that Binance denied:
"Crypto is meant to provide greater financial freedom for people across the globe. To unilaterally decide to ban people's access to their crypto would fly in the face of the reason why crypto exists"
You might think it is morally wrong to not show support to one side, or that to maintain a neutral stance is making a statement, but in the end, crypto knows no citizenships now countries.
The banks might be on the other side and we saw this clearly when the initiative of blocking Russian banks (and citizens) from using the Swift transaction system. But at least exchanges are taking a stand against political pressure. If crypto companies are not impervious to cancel culture, who's to say that maybe it's not about ideals, but about political power. Would Binance respond in the same way if it was China or the USA that asked this very same thing?
I'm not sure, I'd like to say the outcome would be the same. After all, a main point of owning Crypto is getting away from all the centralized entities trying to control every move we make.
International Backlash and sanctions
Some people might think that the sanctions imposed to Russia are not enough to make a dent on their economy and that's a big reason why this way is happening, because there are no consequences. This lead to some social entities and organizations to demand sanctions from private companies against Russian citizens in order to force the government to stop their actions, or maybe force their citizens to act against their own government - perhaps in the form of protesting against this war.
It makes sense, if there can't be any political or economical retaliation or consequences for Russia as a country, turning their citizens against their own government is a good strategy - this is not to say that the Russian citizens are in favor or against this war.
But back to the Crypto side of things
Exchanges are not the Blockchain, they are private entities that can take part or take sides on any event, whether political, economical, social and whatever. For them to freeze assets or block an account to access their funds would be deemed wrong by some of us, but it is their call in the end.
Not your keys, not your crypto, right?
In a free market, exchanges that stay far from making choices and yielding to outside pressure might end up losing users to other exchanges that work more in line with the Crypto values.
Citizen's capital control from the government leads to disaster (for the citizens), and I do believe that no matter what, outside forces shouldn't mess with crypto and the people's financial freedom.
Yeah, I know most Hivers (and curators) avoid politics as much as possible, so I do hope you grasp the intention of this post, which is not about the conflict (and I hope that I was able to transmit my points) but about the imperviousness of the blockchain.