Ethereum's MetaMask Wallet and Infura Cut Off Users in 'Certain' Sanctioned Countries

Two widely used ConsenSys software products, MetaMask and Infura, announced that they "are unavailable in certain jurisdictions due to legal compliance." From a report: The post did not give further information about the compliance issues or the affected jurisdictions, but subsequent tweets point to U.S. and international sanctions on Russia regarding the war in Ukraine. Decrypt has reached out to ConsenSys for clarification regarding its policy of geoblocking IP addresses. The announcement took on added importance after Venezuelans found themselves all but cut off from the Ethereum network today, with many reporting they had been blocked from their wallets. Infura, which hosts Ethereum nodes and operates the blockchain infrastructure on behalf of companies, tweeted that the outage resulted from reconfiguring settings to comply with fresh sanctions. "We mistakenly configured the settings more broadly than they needed to be." The project says it's since resolved the issue and restored access. Around the same time, MetaMask explained that the Infura reconfiguration resulted in a knock-on effect for wallet users.

Re:

[OverlordQ]

MetaMask can't steal your crypto, the default gateway that MetaMask points to is the one that's refusing service.

Point to any other one, or your own, and everything is fine

blocked from their wallets?

[diffract]

I didn't know metamask could do this. So people's funds are indefinitely inaccessible? I'll make sure never to use a wallet that can be restricted remotely like that.

Who owns the wallet

[Matt321]

The ones who know the wallet data jointly own the wallet. That might be YOU, it might be multiple people, it might be YOU and someone you have never met.

Re:

[Srin Tuar]

> It seems Ethereum is 100% geared towards noobs

yes

> Why isn't there a simple ethereumd like bitcoind?

Because you would need a very expensive data center to run it.

> Is there even an official Ethereum local wallet?

nothing worth mentioning.

> Even after 10 years I don't understand how you're suppose to use ETH without using a 3rd party app.

you are supposed to send all your money to the preminers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

http://www.newsbtc.com/2016/08... [newsbtc.com]

https://medium.com/bitcoinerro... [medium.com]

http [medium.com]

Re:

[h33t l4x0r]

Eth web3 is mostly frontend because that's more interesting. Bitcoin is not because you can't really do anything with it anyway other than to send and receive payments. There's some backend web3 libraries but they're mostly just for testing smart contracts.