“We comply with U.S. sanctions law,” an OpenSea spokesperson told Artnet News. “Our terms of service explicitly prohibit sanctioned individuals, individuals in sanctioned jurisdictions, or services from using OpenSea.”
The confirmation came after Twitter account NFTcuba.ART shared a screenshot of an email explaining that an account had been "disabled due to activity that goes against our Terms of Service."
Sanctions in 'decentralized' industry
Though most distributed ledger technology is inherently decentralized, the crypto industry still features large centralized platforms that comply with international sanctions.
Earlier this month, Reuters reported that the U.S. Justice Department was weighing the possibility of charging the biggest crypto exchange, Binance, with money laundering and sanctions violations.
Near the end of November, crypto exchange Kraken agreed to a $362,o00 settlement for violating U.S. sanctions against Iran.
In October, Dapper Labs let users with connections to Russia withdraw their NFTs after temporarily freezing them to comply with EU sanctions. Additionally — and perhaps most notoriously — that month also saw the U.S. Treasury Department sanction open-source crypto mixing software Tornado Cash, an unprecedented move with wide-reaching privacy implications.
