OpenSea, the world’s largest marketplace for NFT, said that it’s banning digital artists from all countries sanctioned by the United States.
OpenSea, a nonfungible token (NFT) platform, has been prohibiting artists and collectors from Cuba, primarily due to US sanctions.30 artists and collectors have reportedly been barred from the well-known NFT marketplace up until this point, according to a report published by Artnet.
The most well-known artist to be fired includes well-known Havana-based artists Fábrica de Arte Cubano and Gabriel Guerra Bianchini.In its terms of service, OpenSea marketplace makes clear that it forbids sanctioned people and anyone who reside in sanctioned countries.
The NFT market’s adherence to US sanctions, which included nations like Venezuela, Iran, and Syria, was well-known. Cuba, however, is now included in that list as a result of the recent restrictions on Cuban artists. An OpenSea Spokesperson stated:
“We continue to holistically evaluate what other measures need to be taken to serve our community and comply with applicable law”
Early in December, the NFT Cuba Art Twitter account claimed that OpenSea had forbidden them from viewing or listing their artwork while they were still in possession of their wallets.
Bit Remasa’s founder, Erich Garca Cruz, retorted that their NFT collections were also prohibited. Gabriel Bianchini, the founder of Cryptocuban, noted that the future of Web3 doesn’t appear to be decentralized.
Other than OpenSea, a number of cryptocurrency platforms had to stop serving Russian users as a result of the new European Union restrictions put in place at the start of the war in Ukraine earlier this year.
Although the bitcoin ecosystem is based on the decentralization concept, the bulk of the middlemen and corporations that facilitate various services continue to operate very much like the majority of centralized Web2 businesses.
The cryptocurrency community demanded the removal of intermediaries in response to its dissatisfaction with the NFT marketplace’s auctions. Another commenter argued that genuine decentralized platforms without regard to nations are necessary.
