The Money Game: Jen Wieczner

Crypto’s Moral Ledger For the big trading platforms, the war in Ukraine has turned borderlessness into a liability.

when western governments imposed sanctions on Russia after the invasion of Ukraine, seeking to sever Vladimir Putin’s banks and billionaires from global capital, Sam Bankman-Fried knew his company would have to comply. The 30-year-old, who is a billionaire 20 times over, runs FTX, one of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges. It’s incorporated in Antigua, headquartered in the Bahamas, and regulated in the U.S. Crypto itself may be a borderless, supranational abstraction, but the companies that have sprung up around it are domiciled in places with laws, and they don’t get to pick and choose which ones to obey.

But after Bankman-Fried responded to the new rules, he went a step further. The American decided to block all Russian banks— even unsanctioned ones—from FTX, the better to ensure that the company’s platforms couldn’t be used to funnel assets to the pariah regime. Russian credit cards stopped working on FTX, and the platform stopped accepting Russian deposits. Then Bankman-Fried shut out banks in Kremlin-aligned Belarus as