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.

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