Swiss authorities will freeze the virtual assets of Russian users that are stored on centralized platforms within the country. This decision was caused by the fact that sanctions began to be imposed on the Russian economy. As the representatives of the Ministry of Finance state, it is necessary to ensure the blockchain integration into the financial system.
The Swiss authorities have no technical capabilities to freeze assets that are stored on cold wallets of Russian users. However, they will be able to intercept them if the virtual assets are located on centralized platforms that operate in the Swiss legal field.
At the same time, not all platforms welcome such a decision. In particular, the EMCD platform, which manages the mining pool, notes that blocking is not the best way in such a situation. But there are also pools that do not allow Russian users to work with them. For example, this was reported yesterday by the large mining pool Ethermine.
How effective such measures will be will be clear in the next few weeks.1 Apparently, some sites will join restrictive measures, while others will not prohibit Russian users from working with cryptocurrencies.
